Beuys Voice. Catalogo della mostra (Zurigo, 13 maggio-14 agosto 2011)

Citation preview

Lucrezia De Domizio Durini

Beuys Voice

KUNSTHAUS

ZURICH

Electa

(7)

a

AL

“i rat rn

Presented by

ta »-d

The Friends of The Library

TAis book purchased vità funds raised nt

the annual Book Gale

Digitized by the Internet Archive in 20283 with funding from Kahle/Austin Foundation

https://archive.org/details/beuysvoice0000dedo

Lucrezia De Domizio Durini

. Beuys Voice

KUNSTHAUS

ZURICH

Electa

In memory ofBuby Durini, Joseph Beuys, Harald Szeemann and Pierre Restany, the Four Cardinal Points of my existence in Art and beyond Art

To my grandson Michelangelo D'Alessandro

Beuys Voice by Lucrezia De Domizio Durini

My deepest gratitude goes to the President of the Kunsthaus, Walter Kielholz, the Director Christoph Becker, to Christian Klemm and to Franziska Lentzsch, as well as to all the people who did all they could to make the exhibition “Joseph Beuys. Difesa della Natura” at Kunsthaus Zurich a successful one

Graphic Concept Lucrezia De Domizio Durini Coordinators Tobia Bezzola and Franziska Lentzsch

Photographs Buby Durini — Archivio Storico De Domizio Durini Post-Beuys Photographs Helenio Barbetta and Gino Di Paolo —

Special thanks go to Tobia Bezzola, cultural manager for the event who, from our first meeting in June 2008, has participated actively and keenly in the overall project, upon which his invaluable work has bestowed great lustre

Archivio Storico De Domizio Durini

Acknowledgement by Lucrezia De Domizio Durini in the Sign of Joseph Beuys

| wish to express my warmest and most respectful gratitude to Eva Beuys and to her children Wenzel and Jessyka for having tenderly shared our experience together in friendship and in work. Today more than ever | feel the need to remember those peaceful days we spent together with the esteem and affection | have always nurtured and that will remain forever

A word of affection and gratitude also goes to Felix Baumann, a very special person and a rare friend who has always been close to me in my path of Art and beyond Art And last but not least are Fernando Zari Malacrida and his family who, in the many tragie moments of my existence, have always helped me to give meaning to life | wish to thank my daughter Tiberia for having understood just how necessary it is that “nothing be lost” of my life

My thanks to all the Authors of the texts for their generous collaboration, who in remembering Beuysian Living Sculpture have participated in this loyal and free cooperation

Kindly supported by

ART MENTOR

FOUNDATION

LUCERNE

ERNST VON SIEMENS KUNSTSTIFTUNG

My deepest gratitude goes to all the artists and intellectuals who, in their various ] explorations, have crossed my journey through and beyond art. neither been \Vithout their close collaboration both my work and my life would have of value nor meaningful.

Testimonial Defence of Nature by Joseph Beuys is the title of an atypical * retrospective” hosted at the Kunsthaus Zurich on May 13, 2011, that IS, twenty-seven years after the famous Discussion of May 13, 1984 in Bolognano. The term “retrospective” in this case takes on a meaning that is not conceptual but, instead, specifically chronological and methodological. The works, editions, documents, photographic images and videos belong to my private Collection and are a fully fledged crowning of the noble work titled Olivestone that has been masterfully held at the Kunsthaus Zurich since May 12, 1990. The temporal reference for the materials on display stretches from the mid-1970s to the mid-1980s, a decade—and the final years of Beuvs's lite—during which the German master sowed the seeds of a rich operative and spiritual pathway together with the collaboration of Buby Durini and my own, within a context of cultural universality in which the limitless plays a key specular role between expansion of thought and human energy: an unrepeatable personal and historical involvement. In this sense the “retrospective” indicates the yearning for a participatory rereading, an artistic and existential corpus objectified by years spent together, while it does not in any way intend to signify a simple cataloguing of works, nor a cold bio-bibliographical recap. The choice made by the Kunsthaus's organizers and curators aims at a more in-depth knowledge of the human and artistic events that Beuys experienced in the Land of the Abruzzi. A multiplicity of disciplines chosen as a way of living allows us today to go over the essential stages in Beuysian work like the chapters of a novel. Not because these works in themselves express a narrative vein, but because the author himself internalized the articulated expression that is triggered by human and natural intentions, without separating the essential aspect from that of delayed phenomena: the representative fiction. Rather, in this exhibition the viewer will find himself face to face with a multiplicity of displays: artworks, drawings, records, recollections, images that are external to every model pertinent to the sphere of artistic fiction. Each signal on display, even the smallest, is a document of reality, of a time lived in direct line with Beuys, and that holds the fundamentals of truth within. The credibility of the works on display is typical of the historical novel, and this publication is a genre that at the Kunsthaus Zurich finds full visual expression. As we said before, the key players in this history Buby Durini and myself, forever involved in deep with the many intellectuals and artists who have and lovingly and generously shared the Beuysian Special attention was paid to the essential stages

ration:

are my late husband human relations, also actively collaborated, spirit. in the Beuysian Ope-

Encounter with Beuys — 1974 Foundation for the Rebirth of Agriculture — 1974 Grassello - 1979 — 1980 Diary of Seychelles — 1980 Activities for the FI.U. — 1974 — 1985 Olivestone — 1984 Ombelico di Venere — 1985 Defence of Nature — 1974 — 1985 Unfinished Works Fully aware of the relevance of my project and of how to render the overall impact of Defence of Nature operation, in the belief that records and recollections are the extension of the work of art, in this exhibition | included every sensitive trace that Beuys left me, from the work to the signal, to the signed object. Nothing here is merely random. The goal is not that of homologating each testimonial to the rank of work of art, but simply to photograph in its integrity the vital image of my Beuysian experience: an organism that is nurtured by multiple sources and countless messages that are expressed through endless creative extensions. As a final and major motivation, the Defence of Nature operation aims at documenting and making known to the international art world all of the productive levels and poetic moments made possible thanks to the precious work of concrete collaboration and absolute cultural support offered to Joseph Beuys by Buby Durini and by myself: it is a significant example and the definitive confirmation of the fact that true artistic creation is never separate from the communication of free individuals. My reflections on the entire path undertaken during those years remind me of the times when | learned from my Master Joseph Beuys those teachings that still today guide me in my everyday, free and wholesome life, that help me to lead a peaceful, courageous and unfailingly generous existence... This way | can believe that we have a strong aptitude for rereading events, for bestowing eyes upon History in a journey towards the future. Only he who, by crossing this marvellous journey-novel, experiences my same feelings, will understand this Testimonial:

With Joseph Beuys a new era for art and for society has begun. This Third Millennium holds Beuysian thinking along with its very roots within. For as long as there is a single plant and a single man on planet Earth the noble Art of Joseph Beuys will live on. Lucrezia De Domizio Durini Bolognano, October 13, 2010

PROPERTY OF LIBRARY OF THE CHATHAMS CHATHAM. NJ

nn

2”Re

Joseph and Eva Beuys Dusseldorf 1976

Contents Fourth Station Beuys. Complexities and historical references

309

Annotation

Sd

sa Beuys and Romanticism

315

Beuys and Steiner

328

Beuys and Schelling

338

257,

Beuys. Drawing

354.

30

Fifth Station 369 Beuys and the Post-Beuys at Bolognano in Defence of Nature

Third Station The Voice

97

Bolognano the town of Culture in Nature

371

Beuys. Life and Works

99

Bolognano. An Artistic Utopia (From Ilaria Apostoli's dissertation)

374

Beuys, the Man

214

Beuys, the Sculptor

220

Beuys. Politics, Economics and Teaching

254

Readings Felix Baumann Amnon Bazel Gabriella Belli, Pierparide Tedeschi

411 412 418 430

Waldo Bien Demosthenes Davvetas Gino Di Paolo Carl Giskes Wolker Harlan Gérard Geoges Lemaire Christa-Maria Lerm Hayes Pilar Parcerisas Pierre Restany Harald Szeemann Johannes Stùttgen Baberth Mondini-VanLoo U We Claus Doroty Wolker Louwrien Wijers Vitantonio Russo

441 444 462 463 465 473 480 483 526 550 576 588 592 597 602 618

Marco Bagnoli

630

The Diamond

18

Foreword

15

First Station Christoph Becker

119

Second Station A Life Told

25

Introduction Present Time. Between Past and Future. Notes

Readings Lucrezia De Domizio Durini

634.

Sixth Station Beuys from Bolognano to Zurich

901

Beuys, Universal Architect

635

903

Beuys and the Art of Cooking

644

A Virtual Conversation Tobia Bezzola and Lucrezia De Domizio Durini

Diary of Seychelles

666

Beuys in Italy

9283

The Story of Olivestone

702

Multiples in Italy

927

Buby Durini for Joseph Beuys

749

Who is Joseph Beuys?

940

Documents

764

Autobiography by Joseph Beuys

948

Discussion by Joseph Beuys Foundation for the Rebirth of Agriculture

766

Brief reasoned biography of Joseph Beuys from 1921 to 1964

948

Action Third Way

789

Biography of Joseph Beuys from 1965 to 1986

952

Discussion by Joseph Beuys Defence of Nature —- May 13, 1984

824 Remember Buby Durini

960

Testimonials Beuys, Lucrezia, Buby Durini

848

Biography of Lucrezia De Domizio Durini

962

Layout of the exhibition at the Kunsthaus ZUrich

966

Felix Baumann, Pippo Gianoni, Gian Ruggero Manzoni, Pierre Restany, Harald Szeemann, Una and Ingeborg Szeemann, Panos Spartan Papadolias, Giorgio Gaslini, Umberto Petrin, Claudio Sarmiento, Fernando Zari Joseph Beuys, documents from 1972 to 1985

896

N.B. Beuys's sentences are taken from the discussions held in Abruzzo from 1974 to 1984

Joseph Beuys, Basel 1974

following pages Kunsthaus ZUrich 12

The Diamond On the occasion of the survey exhibition Defence of Nature at the Kunsthaus ZUrich where my donation Olivestone by Joseph Beuys is now housed, the last great work that is a part of the artist's Italian project, | feel the need to go over a broader formula and, biographically speaking, a more analytical and creative one, of Beuys's work and thinking. | will also attempt to provide an overall vision of the work of dissemination that has taken place and that is still taking place today in this Post-Beuys period. This is a tribute to the man-artist who spent his life taking us and our problems seriously, without inventing methods, but rather devoting with generous humanity his entire existence to a search for improvement in society's methods. | will try to explain how his famous Concrete Utopia is consolidated in Italy, and specifically in a small town called Bolognano with only three hundred inhabitants in the Abruzzi region, in Utopia of the Land. A town he himself said was his home away from home: Bolognano the town of Culture in Nature Within this loyal, spiritual and universal vision, | have tried to piece together a story, a sort of ambiguous novel where the ambitious Beuysian project touches upon the nerve centres of making contemporary art, breaking with traditions and turning towards the betterment of society and the evolution of human conscience... I have always thought of Beuys as a Diamond. A diamond is multifaceted; and because each facet is transparent it makes all the other facets visible, notwithstanding its compactness and unity. To understand Beuys's work, and to be able to judge it, we must not limit ourselves to a formal key, but rather it must be considered deeply as a whole, analyzing the complexity of its parts, the aspects of interest in the social and all of its implications, so as to understand the true reasons for this man's actions and the purpose of his Art. The reader of this publication will come face to face with the famous Living Sculpture, with the virtual transubstantiation of many people and instances that together belong to Beuysian loyal and free collaboration with “Social Plastic" Buby Durini's images provide an "echo" for the visual completion of a total dedication always and uniquely addressed towards the dissemination of Joseph Beuys's thinking and work. My publication goes well beyond my book Joseph Beuys. The Felt Hat, A Life Told published about twelve years ago, as it is Much broader in scope, adding situations of life experienced after the death of my Master in my passionate quest for the noble Art of Beuys the Voice.

I try to talk about problems we have in common because we are all part

ofa single organism (Joseph Beuys)

Foreword I worked in a direct line with Joseph Beuys in the last thirteen years of his life on the Italian operation Defence of Nature. The artist's last totally Italian masterpiece that we often tend to forget... Beuys's Defence of Nature should not simply be understood from an ecological point of view, but it must chiefly be read in an anthropological sense. Hence: Defence of Man, of the Individual, of Creativity. Defence of Human Values. All of which are of topical importance on planet Earth today. This anti-methodological publication could lead to numerous interpretations, so | wish to make it very clear that my idea was to recreate a unique virtual Living Sculpture by making use of the Voice that Beuys himself handed over, with generosity and a sense of expansion, in interviews, declarations, autographs and using every possible means, to his first benefactors, the van der Grinten brothers, his friends and authors Gòtz Adriani, Winfried Konnertz, Karin Thomas and Caroline Tisdall, one of the greatest experts to evoke Beuysian thinking, to his students, to art critics such as Bernard Lamarche-Vadel, Pierre Restany, Harald Szeemann, his great sentimental interlocutor, to the Italian figures of Factotum Art, and to all those people who with foresight have believed in and loved the noble Art of the German Master, contributing to disseminating the “credo” of one of the most complex and educational figures of the world's history of art in the post-Second World War period: Joseph Beuys The Voice. It is the purpose of this complex work to reflect two of the more unique aspects of Beuysian thinking: reappropriation and creative freedom. The former consists in a precious aptitude for reconstruction more than a conquest ex novo, discovery more than invention: it thus points to the need to expand and extend energies for the goal of finding out the truth. In this sense, for Beuys the need to speak using whatever means available has found its complete answer in the work of a lifetime. The second aspect is characterized by that famous creative freedom of humankind that Beuys so much preached and taught across the world. No concept, no judgement was formulated by me without first finding a real fundamental. | attempted to enact a profound reflection, thanks to a thorough reading of the texts by major figures in international culture, thus crossing a historical path of relations and facts that actually took place, and that are witnesses to an undeniable truth.

The main purpose of this publication is to correctly interpret the artist's thinking and to make known his prophetic force, which will be recognized by all of us as we learn to deeply analyze our own inner reality. In this publication | have tried to make known the teaching | had received from my Master. And it is thanks to this natural aura that the educational and groundbreaking message of the social reality that even today Beuys The Voice addresses to the world for the betterment of the human race can continue to reign. Faithfully yours, Lucrezia De Domizio Durini

re

Serao en

piso

=

I

Willi

e

os

TO

First Station

Christoph Becker

This book brings together the work of a lifetime and it also tells the story of a friendship. For about fifteen years, Joseph Beuys, who would have turned ninety in May 2011, was a much cherished guest at the home of Giuseppe “Buby” Durini in Bolognano, in the Abruzzi region. It is on the Durini estate, situated in this harsh yet picturesque landscape, that Beuys, over the course of his numerous sojourns there, developed a later work of his characterized by profound majesty and coherence. Olivestone is the major work from that period, a work that thanks to the mediation of Harald Szeemann arrived at the Kunsthaus in 1992 donated by Baroness Lucrezia De Domizio Durini in memory of the deep friendship and close collaboration that bound the Baroness and her husband to Joseph Beuys. In 1984, in the ancient Durini palazzo, Beuys chose five monumental antique sandstone tubs that had once been used by the Durini family's farmstead to decant oil, and he placed inside them a parallelepiped also made from sandstone that acted as a plug. Beuys asked that an interstice be left between the parallelepipeds and the tubs to act as a communicating vessel inside which the oil could flow between the ancient tub and the new parallelepiped. The tubs were filled with olive oil which was absorbed by the pores of the entire sculpture to produce a reflecting surface. Clearly, the outer part of the sculpture, which consisted of the ancient vat, had for centuries been impregnated with oil, while the inner parallelepiped, built using the same type of stone, but fundamentally new, given its porosity and capacity for absorption, even today requires dozens of litres of oil for the sculpture to reflect the entire environment in which it was placed. The stone acts as an agent, the oil as a conductor of energy; the two elements are sensitively present. The oil penetrates gradually and breaks down the rough walls of the parallelepipeds, which over time will disintegrate and become an organic mineralamalgam: “olivestone” itself. The five masses ripped away from nature by the hand of man are like sarcophagi, symbolizing life and death, and in time they will return to nature and from the heap of their remains a new life will be born. Olivestone is a living monument and it is perhaps Beuys's only work that still has a “function” and will continue to have one for many years to come. Beuys's idea is clearly that the artist does not just produce the artwork, but is, rather, an individual actively at the service of society; at the same time, society offers the artist the substantial support that is at the root of all artistic expression. This utopia, which is how Beuys himself referred to it, leads to the interaction between all of this artist's activities, from plastic creations to figurative works, from actions to the writing of manuscripts, from discussions to manifestos, down to his drawings and multiples. And all of this “art-making” is combined in a process that in itself is a work of art. During his stays in Bolognano many other works and actions by Beuys saw the light, both in sculptural form and within the context of “nature. This complex operation paved the way for his famous work called Defence of Nature. On the land owned by the Durini family, Beuys created grandiose installations using plants and shrubs, and especially his Paradise Plantation. In Bolognano, over the course of the years, debates, meetings and other events had taken place, for which there are a large number of records that Lucrezia De Domizio has preserved in the ancient Durini palazzo. This collector's extraordinary efforts have consisted in her capacity not just to preserve and carefully record Beuys's work as a complex process, but also to constantly remember the artist's creative drive and recall to life the interaction mentioned earlier. The collection on display here clearly shows that an understanding of Beuys's works did not end with the artist's death, and that his works cannot be seen as the mere relics of a process— which would further complicate their preservation and transmission—but rather that they represent an artistic and educational process that continues 21

to be enacted in our society. This volume and exhibition go beyond the preservation of documents; they are an intense action against the threat looming over Beuysian work and his conception of art; this is the threat of immobility which would be tantamount to death or oblivion. Lucrezia De Domizio's many years of work is living proof of the effectiveness of Beuys's thinking, which both looks at the present and turns to the future. Today we have the opportunity to enjoy the whole of Beuys's Defence of Nature where the main work, Olivestone,

is related to the others from which it was generated,

and to the documents that accompanied it; it is a stroke of good luck, and not just for those who will understand this work but even more so for Joseph Beuys himself. Not often (and only rarely in museums) are we given the opportunity to touch an entity such as this one, and this fills us both with gratitude and pride.

Fond thoughts go to Harald Szeemann); it is thanks to his friendship with Buby and Lucrezia Durini that today we have the Olivestone at Kunsthaus ZUrich. Felix Baumann, at the time the director of the Kunsthaus, and Christian Klemm, in charge of the conservation of the collections, took an active part in the success of the donation. Lucrezia De Domizio is the initiator and key actor in this important volume that does not just bring together the entire collection, but records the history that is inextricably bound to the genesis of the works themselves. Heartfelt thanks go to Tobia Bezzola, the learned and meticulous curator of the Zurich exhibition, who made an essential contribution to the birth of this publication, for which the publishers Mondadori Electa provided an excellent form in the layout and quality of the printing. Thanks also go to Franziska Lentzsch for her support in sorting out countless organizational issues, to Karin Marti for having known how to give the operation a logical flow, to the excellent consultants, especially Peter Uhlmann, who helped us find answers to numerous questions. We received great support from Lucrezia De Domizio's daughter Tiberia, from Lino Federico, her ever-present right-hand arm, who was always very amicable during the course of our many activities, especially when it came to the logistics. We are proud to say that this ambitious project was supported by the Art Mentor Foundation Lucerne, and by the Ernst von Siemens Kunststiftung. This book owes its birth to an extraordinarily varied and long-lasting friendship between different people and to the trusting response of the Kunsthaus Zurich. The engine behind this friendship was Lucrezia De Domizio. The whole world must be grateful to her for her passing on the artistic legacy of Defence of Nature and even more so for the fact that this legacy continues to exist: the work of a lifetime. The extraordinary force of a long-lasting friendship, one that was deep and heartfelt, is a rare and precious thing. All of this fills us with joy and immense gratitude. Long live Lucrezia! Zurich, February 2011

previous page from left: Christoph Becker, Franziska Lentzsch, Lucrezia De Domizio, Peter UhImann in front of the Oak planted by Joseph Beuys on May 13, 1984 at Bolognano

22

Christoph Becker, Franziska Lentzsch, Lucrezia De Domizio, Peter UhImann visiting Beuys' Studio and Paradise Plantation, and Lucrezia's private collection in Palazzo Durini at Bolognano, November 18, 2010

}

Second Station

A Life Told

Introduction

Ninety years (1921-2011) since the birth of my Master and twentyfive years since that sad, premature journey of no return, | feel the Urge, the need to take a reverse journey: a resurrection. Too many eyes have seen Beuys and his work, too many ears have heard his Voice. Too many hearts... Joseph Beuys: Once more | feel as though | need to start all over again from the wound itself Let's start from the presupposition that | have grown weak—let's admit, rather, that | have already collapsed and am lying in a ditch— and yet a resolution would nonetheless emerge from this ditch. As | am here to illustrate my ideas on the subject—Talk About Your Own Country! believe that the chief means that might lead to such a coming back to life could be the source of what we refer to today as the German language. In the desire to raise oneself from below—to rebuild, that is, from the ruins—in the yearning that should enliven our path towards the previously mentioned source, availing ourselves of our gifts, but also—and above all—being aware of our Inadequacies, we will realize that in heading towards this spring of water, in making use of the German language, we will be unable not to speak to each other and we actually might not realize, by experiencing it within ourselves, that from such speech not only would our physical health be restored, but an elementary and profound understanding would germinate inside us as concerns what takes place on the earth where we live and for whatever has died in the fields, the woods, the meadows and the mountains.

Joseph Beuys and Lucrezia De Domizio at Documenta VI, Kassel 1977

The need to talk, communicate, express oneself using every means available, which Beuys used these very words to underscore, was fully accomplished in the work of a lifetime. For Beuys, to be an artist meant living a life together with others, seeking therein solid relationships and fraternal cooperation, that “elementary and deepseated understanding of everything that takes place on this earth," because what happens on our plant also happens within us. We cannot survive if we don't talk to one another. Every man needs others, because the forces that are intrinsic to each individual, whether plant or animal, require nourishment through communication and love. And Beuys cannot help but rise up again and go on living. Akin to Beuys is every man who has ever decided to be a real man, that is, an artist. | believe that this is the message, if we wish to call it so, which he conveyed to us through the way he practiced his entire life and his artistry. 27

Since Beuys died, | have used every means available—publications, Exhibitions, Donations, Lectures, Essays, Conferences, Senior theses, Forums, | have planted oak trees and gardens—to spread Beuysian thought across the world.

Whenever l've been given the chance to, in cities and countries, in public and private spaces, and without profit, my sole intent has been to remind man of the basic principles of our Mother Nature, principles that Joseph Beuys for his entire life generously went around preaching for the betterment of society. A legacy of thoughts and actions handed down to me by the German Master with whom | had the great fortune to collaborate together with my husband Buby Durini in many of the world's countries over the last fourteen years of his life (1972/1986), and always with a direct reference to his Defence of Nature operation, the greatest masterpiece in the history of Contemporary Art History. An Anthropological Defence: In Defence of Man and the Safeguarding of Nature, topics that continue to be crucially important today. More than any other artist, Beuys was capable of and wanted to embody the human figure in the transcendence art, turning his own efforts in the direction of the utopian territory of natural energy and spiritual communication: reality as the phenomenological spirit of human possibilities. To this regard, | find it necessary to draw attention to this shamanic artist and prophetic and anticipatory figure who, at the threshold of the third millennium, is yet to be interpreted, discovered and analyzed. Joseph Beuys was the active forerunner of all the cultural, social, environmental, economic and political issues which plague all men on earth today. The purpose of this latest publication of mine, which | intend to offer to the world as the signet of an entire life spent in countless fields accompanied by the teachings of one of the most influential and emblematic post-Second World War Masters of the History of Art, is to cast light on his thinking, what he truly believes in regard to a variety of opinions. But, as we would for any other person, | cannot do this without making room for the form and vehicle of Beuysian thought, i.e. the word. so let us continue to speak about Beuys, and let us allow Beuys to continue to speak to us. This will not be a book about Beuys: this will be The Voice of Joseph Beuys. A Voice that reminds Man to be a true Man

Joseph Beuys in his studio in Drakeplatz, Dùsseldorf 1984.

28

Present Time. Between Past and Future. Notes

There exists no other revolutionary force than the creative power of man (Joseph Beuys) \Ne are experiencing a historical moment in which the “virus” of power has assembled an army of men who are trying to commit the genocide of legends, fantasies, utopias, dreams and hopes, but who are essentially trying to turn freedom into a sort of democratic authority, where the obligation of corruption starts from the vanity of thinking and quickly spreads to good taste, to civility and to the many aspects of our daily life, despotically also invading Art and the system of Art. Hence, a sort of group pressure phenomenon has evolved where personal interest triumphs over aspirations and demands, where transparency and history, creativity and values have been replaced by the hegemony of party politics and adaptation to the mass media image, where Italian/American political strategies and capitalistic power manage art along with man's everyday life. \Ne find ourselves in a state of profound, worldwide crisis. It is a multidimensional crisis whose many sides touch each and every aspect of our lives: our physical, mental and spiritual health, and our means of subsistence; food as nourishment for the body, communication as nourishment for social thinking, the quality of the environment and of human relations. The economy, politics, technology, culture. It is a crisis of intellectual, moral and spiritual scope. Truly a threat to any space for dialectic and good taste. So that the present crisis is not just a crisis of individuals, of governments or institutions, but rather It is a transition on a planetary scale. As individuals, as a society, as a civilisation and as an ecosystem we are finally approaching a Turning Point. Cultural transformations of such proportions and depth cannot be obstructed. Ve should not try to stop them, on the contrary, we should try to welcome them with open arms as the only chance to avoid anguish, collapse or fossilization. VWVhat we need in order to prepare ourselves for the great transition we are about to enter is an in-depth analysis of our culture's given principles and values. It is a refusal of those conceptual values that have lived beyond their usefulness and a fresh acknowledgement of some of the values we had cast aside before, in the earlier eras of our cultural history. Never before have we had so much to say about the Earth as in recent times. As if the earth had only now appeared for the first time. And yet men have made an endless number of discoveries: whole indigenous populations hidden in forests, on continents, in faravay 30

lands, new creatures of nature. But the Earth was never the object of discovery. The astronauts by leaving the Earth were the ones who discovered it, took pictures of it; actually, they were the ones to help us recognize the Earth from afar. There is only one Earth. It is the Common House of all of mankind, a universal room, a living system that produces goods for every one of its inhabitants. Not only does it act as an organism, but it seems that it really is an organism. We don't just inhabit the Earth, we are the Earth. This is why the Latin “homo” comes from “humus; which means earth. And yet we continue to commit this epochal suicide. Each day, all of us, in myriad ways with our merciless greed and thoughtless violence act against the earth. Each day we destroy our “House. Because of our stubbornness and stupidity we become Obtuse and don't understand that although we are going to die, the earth will be saved. Worthy of note to this regard is the interesting discussion that took place on May 13, 1984 in Bolognano between the artist Mario Bagnoli and Joseph Beuys, rounding off the celebrated discussion Defence of Nature (we shall go back to the topic in the Fifth Station). Marco Bagnoli: We imagine that we have awareness of the tree. And the tree itself may be a symbol of such awareness. My question for Beuys is to ask him if this tree has awareness of us. And if this is so, isn't it the tree that, materially, plants us, by absorbing our awareness? And if it isn't, wouldn't the tree then be that external god who has died for the purpose of finding rebirth in our consciousness? Joseph Beuys: Thank you very much Marco. VVhat you've implied is something with which | completely agree. In planting trees, we plant the tree and the tree plants us, since we belong together. It's something that takes place by moving in two different directions at the same time. So the tree has awareness, or consciousness, of us just as we have awareness of the tree. It's therefore extremely important to try to create or stimulate an interest for these kinds of interdependencies. If we don't respect the authority, or the genius, or the intelligence of the tree, the tree has so much intelligence that it can decide to telephone a message about the sad state of human kind. The tree will give a call or two to the animals, to the mountains, to the clouds, to the rivers; it will decide to talk with the power of geology, and if humankind fails, nature will take terrible revenge, most terrible revenge, and this will be an expression of natures intelligence and an attempt to bring people back to clear reason by means of violence. If people have no other choice than to remain confined within their stupidity and to give no consideration to the intelligence of nature, and if they refuse to show any tendency to enter into cooperation with nature, then nature will turn to violence to force human beings to take a different course. We're at a point at which we have to make a decision. Either we do it, or we don't. If we don't we'Il be faced with enormous catastrophes all over this planet. Cosmic intelligence will turn against humankind. But now, for a certain period of time, we still 31

have the possibility of making a free decision and of deciding to take a course that's different from the course we've travelled in the past. We can still decide to bring our own intelligence into line with the intelligence of nature. lm therefore very thankful for Marco Bagnoli's remarks, because he has brought up an extremely important aspect of our problem. Even though we can seem to be talking mysticism, were dealing in fact with reality. And it's surely a question of a kind of reality that sentirely different from what goes by such a name in positivistic and materialistic ways of thinking. VWnenever people talk to me about reality, | always ask, “But what kind of reality are you talking about? Which reality?” That is the question. In the countless discussions held in numerous countries the world over Beuys was never apocalyptic. But Beuys never lost faith in man's intelligence—But now, for a while longer, we still have the chance to freely come to a decision, the decision to venture down a path that is different from the one we ventured down in the past—A hope, a shattered dream that around twenty-seven years later, because of the stupidity of today's society, has been cast aside. We eager “sowers"” have the duty to sow our seeds in impenetrable soil. But we also need to be busy “gardeners. VVe need to toil continually to make the earth fertile; ve need to work the land, root out the weeds, water the land, plough it and plant the seeds. Little does it matterifnot every seed germinates; one plant is enough, a plant that will bear fruit and more seeds... This is the teaching Joseph Beuys left behind. And so... we need to clarify things for ourselves, and in regard to the laws that govern man's values. VWVe need to return to the ability to analyse other people's behaviour as the only real truth about ourselves. We need to create a design for life, a Project, for our future. During this phase of reappraisal and cultural rebirth, the reduction to an absolute minimum of the malaise, the discord and conflict that inevitably accompany us in the direction of times of great social change is of crucial importance if we wish to make the transition as painless as possible. Hence, ve must not limit ourselves to attacking social groups or institutions or figures compromised by the various strategies, but instead demonstrate how their attitudes and behaviour reflect a system of values that is at the very basis of our culture as a whole, a system that has currently been superseded. It will be necessary to recognize and make as public as possible the fact that the social changes currently under way are the manifestations of a much broader and inevitable cultural change. Only thus will we be capable of approaching some sort of cultural and peaceful transformation.

The artist today plays a key role in the social change. A responsibility that shows his own substantial need. It is a power that gathers, with32

holds and shapes humanity. This is the artist's task, because art is fed by all that society condemns, excludes, sets aside and forgets. Many contemporary painters trace a few simple lines, paint canvases or let themselves go without restraint and fill the spaces before them with objects they have matched with neither rhyme or reason, lifelessly, justifying what they have done by saying: “Whether or not the work resembles something is of no importance”; other artists use new languages: they unthinkingly use video, photography, computers; others still attempt to copy ‘reality’ as faithfully as possible, and the more they force themselves to do this, the farther they move away from spirituality. Neither the one nor the other is right. The artist is he who creates Art so that it plays a central role in our lives, so that its role is first and foremost to change our way of living, thinking, seeing. A change in dynamics and radical learning without end. The artist's intellectual zone plays an important role in the passing and evolution of time, a role that enlightens bewildered, darkened minds, revealing the secret of art and showing the way to wandering travellers. There are men who do not believe in the therapeutic value of art. The artist today must be at the Service of Society to make a better life for humankind. \e are thus experiencing a very complex period from every aspect of human value. A wearying confusion, a pot-pourri of materialistic feelings that point to a single road and a single concept: the Life of Profit which has two dead-ends: Power and the /mage. Contemporary man is mutilated, incomplete, he is his own enemy. Marx defined him as “alienated” Freud used the word “repressed” Nowadays man has lost that state of ancient harmony that binds his soul with “the Love which moves the sun and the other stars...

(Dante).

following pages Joseph Beuys, New York, October 1979

Ve might then ask ourselves: what is it that has caused such ethical upheaval and touched upon the daily nature of the different structures in our lives? | believe, l'm actually convinced, that contemporary man has rid his life of a Respect for Time. In one of his sermons Saint Francis of Sales speaks to the faithful of the haste that man is unconsciously threatened by, and reminds us that the more we hurry the more we are muddied. There is nothing more precious than Time. It is time that leads us to discover our identity and thus tells us the truth about who we really are, because Time is the Truth of all men. Nothing else belongs to us as totally as time does; time is our only asset, and yet in this society characterized by rapid consumption, modern man thinks that if he doesn't do everything quickly he will be wasting time... but he doesn't know what to do with the time he saves, except kill it... 33

Most people rush about, run, chase, seek... or rummage about in the dark and... all feelings, all values crumble... and... believe that time is passing. We can call this idea ‘time; but it's really a very inaccurate idea; the truth of the matter is that as we can only see time as something that passes, we have a hard time understanding that it lies right within itself, in the essence that Hegel calls the Spirit in Time. This is the Spirit that impresses a common mark on religion, on political constitution, on social ethics, on the legal system, on customs, but also on science, on technological skill and... much more on Art; it is the path that leads humankind toward those higher powers by means of which the man-artist reinforces his creative energies, resists the pressures of the world and spiritualizes all of life.

Art is a free and alternative form of human existence; it is the place of essentialness and absolute tension, where the artist does not reproduce the visible but makes the soul itself visible through the various languages. We know that communication is the condicio sine qua non of human life and social order. And it is also evident that a human being is involved from the very start of his existence in a complex process of acquiring the rules of communication. In his reasoning Aristotle began an analysis of the forms of language and the formal structure of conclusions and deductions regardless of their content. He thus achieved a degree of abstraction and precision that had been unacknowledged until then in Greek philosophy and thus contributed immensely to clarifying and establishing order in our methods of thinking. He actually created the fundamentals for scientific language. The human being is characterized by a general faculty of language that presides over the various means of expression and that can be defined as follows: the faculty to establish a relationship between an idea and a sign, whether this be a sound, a gesture, a figure or a drawing. “Language is not to inform, but to evoke” (Jacques Lacan) Hence, the artist chooses for his creative expressions his own language capable of signifying the essential concept of his own artistic research. Mans fundamental language is thinking and this is even more true of the man-artist; and, if his thinking is strong, then the artist can enjoy the privilege of using both archetypal materials and new languages to make his works of art. It is precisely along this path that his research can be read as a magical message which, by crossing the infinite expanses of man's moral heritage, outlines the peaks of the great landscape of universal culture. This way, along with his work the true artist creates his own language as he forever considers the “word” as an instrument of thinking. The word and doing trace the logical image of the facts. Unfortunately, in the age we live in communication is used in a way that we can describe as immoderate. Television media take part in this violently, they often speak without thinking, we are filled with 36

arrogance; nor do we ponder before expressing opinions and facts; we have erased all memory. From the mid-1980s a new language was born: videomatics, which has become a privileged means of conversation, information, distraction, culture, participation in public and private life. The technology of information has transformed every single aspect of our lives, it has changed how and where we live and

what we do. A change in our past, present and future culture. Man is becoming aware of a gap that is gradually growing between the real vorld and the world of the media. Television has encoded what is unreal, with a model for television that is increasingly petite-bourgeois, hypocritical, conformist. The body's messages offered up for every one to see have become the obsession of our civilization. Contemporary society has acquired a new formula of visuality: aesthetic communication. This is a reference linked to a sort of aesthetic ontology of mass consumption that attempts to satisfy through the market the needs of as many people as possible at the least cost, by exploiting serial production—one of the essential features bestowed by technology—to do so. Everyday life is often bitter, unnerving, living with others can be mer ciless, and it is hard day after day to come to terms with one's own differences by measuring them up to the yardstick made up of petty material realities that chop feelings up and bury idealized concepts. \e live in an era where the economy has become pathological, a virus that touches upon every single aspect of our lives, our way of living and thinking. Everyday occurrences themselves are an exercise in survival, the mind is drunk with ephemeral practices, the road to profit is closed off by two dead-ends: power and the image. An obscure world, an ambiguous one, where disagreements have multiplied and everyone seems to be sure of his authoritative despotism, while everything is distorted and at the same time accepted and activated. The truth of the matter is that arrogant and heated arguments are a far cry from Beuysian Direkte Demokratie. In this society quality is directly proportional to compromise and economic greed. Success is not achieved by reason but by false rhetoric. In this day and age victory can be accomplished only by men with common sense who use their ability to think, by artists who create languages where art is at the service of society for the purpose of improving man, and by intellectuals who are brave enough to report tyranny and abuse of power. Only art can save man from blindness. Art as language sums up the unity of multiple concepts under an idea that crosses and touches the very foundations of Nature and the principles of cosmic, universal love. For the artist, this language acquires a totally different Meaning, one that flees from contemporary trends, from what is actually stated. Thinking does not need words to express itself. The Artist uses a creative world that appropriates its own specific language, both archetypal and current, to compile its own vocabulary that renders the invisible visible. His language has a very specific function 37

that expresses things through doing, continuous feed-back, behaviour that constitutes the truth about ourselves. In his work the Artist experiences the great secret of Art and Life because it is through the principle of retroaction that behaviour can periodically be confronted, as it is also capable of modifying future behaviour through the results obtained, where “the true value of man is determined by the measure and the sense in which he has obtained liberation from the Self." (Albert Einstein) Within every organism, including man, is a constructive force that tends toward the realization of its own intrinsic possibilities. VVhen a person and even more so an artist comes into contact with it and has the courage to make some precise and responsible choices, then new and exciting lifestyles emerge. The artist has the privilege of unknowingly possessing this innate inner force, a revolutionary and destructive force that he sets in motion with each gesture and action, in relations and circumstances, in his sublime creativity. A free force that possesses the capacity to involve men and things with intensity. A fruitful good at the service of society, always and in any event aimed at the betterment of man. Creativity merges with the metaphor of a natural and divine world which aims at reminding man of silence and utopia, voice and col ours, forms and the dynamics of Nature as opposed to a world that devours and forgets the essential principles of Mother Nature and violates the spiritual zone of man.

But what exactly does spirituality mean in today's society? What design can the artist of the 20th century trace out, in a century where business and the ephemeral rule? Where the greed of the image, by tearing Memory asunder, demolishes intelligence? And yet many talented contemporary artists now live in a sort of ex istential bewilderment, they have fallen into that necrophilic trap of their own selfish indulgence and they are no longer able to formulate the ends of life, of reason, of knowledge. I like to quote one of Kafka's metaphorical teachings: “| know of an old man who used to say: ‘| scarcely understand, for instance, how a young man can decide to ride over to the next village without being afraid that ... even the span of a normal happy life may fall far short of the time needed for such a journey!" 20th-century art inexorably demands two impelling conditions of the artist. First and foremost a sense of the vivification of the spirit: “| will give them another heart, and | will put a new spirit within you; and | will take the stony heart out of their flesh, and will give them a heart of flesh..." (Saint Augustine). To paraphrase these words we can say that this is the sole mission of an artist of this millennium. We are really very tired of seeing artists that restate the déjà vu of televisions, events that take place in the street, in advertising and in fashion journals, or that by dethroning the figures and facts of history underscore their sick Art with the consensus of the criticism that is in 38

power, sold to the political system or to Italian/American capitalism. We are disgusted by false innovations, | agree with Benjamin when he says: “Among the great creators, there are implacable ones who first of all make a clean break... In these last few decades some artists have deliberately chosen silence, because silence is also /ogos and it is precisely in this weaving of silence and the word that they have worked to create a healthy, blessed language, a continuous and incontrovertible language, emitted from the depths of space and time where their great secret lives and cohabits: the acoustic of the soul. The second point concerns the comparison between artists of different nations, generational states, of different researches, linked together by a strong sense of reciprocal freedom and choice of a profound sort of work, a healthy and silent way of thinking that holds within a message of social, cultural and economic rebirth. From this reading we can reflect on the Present Time and on the cultural legacy left behind by great men. Only then will we be able to understand that our present is dramatic because man attempts to apply to Nature the same treatment he gives cities, islands, the countryside, the whole planet. The artist must remove himself from the consumerism in which he has dreadfully been trapped and instead contemplate Time, its per ception, on the different spiritual depths of man and nature, exploiting, on the one hand, the value of the spatiality of the mind as an attitude of man's intuitive potential and, on the other, the courage of truth, of the truth that goes beyond the systems needed to live and love reality. The Economy of Culture In the Art System a cancer has spread that with its metastases causes a crucial imbalance in the Economy as well. Which Economy are we talking about? Art does not possess economic “value,” because as it is pure anarchy it has no interest in such a thing. The market establishes a price for the work of art, but it has never regulated its true values. How can we assign a price to the Michelangelo's Sistine Chapel, or to his Pietà? The truth of the market is nihilism at its purest state, a totalitarian and efficacious force for which no defence exists. While the financial market uses quality experts, the art market is headed by insignificant figures with no knowledge whatever of art; technicians capable of transmuting “rubbish” into fake diamonds. This is the type of fruition that the market sets in motion in art by unabashedly using media complicity. At this point, it might be of interest to read a paragraph by Robert Hughes from his book Nothing if Not Critical: Selected Essays on Art and Artists, The Harvill Press, 1991: “Until a few years ago, one popular Marxist theory stated that good taste and knowledge were the market's sole activity, polite manners used to hide vulgar com39

mercialism. Those who believed this should take a look at the current The art market is completely art market and correct their past opinion. directed by speculators, victims of fashion, and rich and ignorant people. The collector as connoisseur has been ousted from the market. Knowledge is nothing more than an obstacle to its progress. Submitted to the malignant scheming of the market, genuine knowledge is virtually superfluous and will soon vanish. The aim is that of erasing all the values that might keep anything at all from becoming a ‘masterpiece!" We might therefore agree with the Australian critic by concluding that the market destroys knowledge, while it produces diamonds... At this point it is interesting to note, more than thirty years hence, the German master Joseph Beuys's Appeal for an Alternative, dated December 23, 1978; notwithstanding the changes in time, it is still obvious that this initiative is very topical even today (from the Annuario Il Clavicembalo 1979-1980)

APPEAL FOR AN ALTERNATIVE This appeal is directed to all people in the European sphere of culture and civilization. The breakthrough into a new social future can succeed if a movement develops in the European zones which, through its regenerative faculties, levels the walls between East and West, and bridges the gap between North and South. It would be a start if, let's say, the people of Central Europe decided to act along the lines of this appeal. If today in Central Europe we commenced to live and work together in our states and societies in accordance with the demands

of our time,

it would have strong repercussions in every other part of the world. Be warned against impetuous change. Before considering the question WHAT CAN WE DO, we have to look into the question HOW MUST WE THINK?, so that the lip service that all political parties today pay to the highest ideals of mankind becomes the real thing, and is no longer belied by the actual practices of our economic, political and cultural reality. Let us start with SELECONTEMPLATION. Let us ask ourselves what prompts us to reject the status quo. Let us seek the ideas that indicate to us the direction we should take to make a new start. Let us examine the concepts on which we have based our regulation of the conditions in the East and West. Let us consider whether these concepts have furthered our social organism and its correlation with the natural order of things; whether they have led us to the establishment of a healthy existence, or whether they have harmed mankind, and now put even mankind's very survival on the line.

Through careful observation of our own needs, let us reflect wheth40

er the principles of western capitalism and eastern communism are receptive to that which, judging from recent developments, more and more clearly emerges as the central impulse in the soul of man, and expresses itself as the will to concrete self-responsibility: to be freed from a relationship founded on command and subjugation, power and privilege. | have pursued this question patiently for some years. Without the help of many other people, whom | encountered in the course of this research and experience, | would hardly have come to the answers which | want to communicate in this appeal. Thus, these answers are not just “my opinion”; they have also been recognized by many other people. At present, there are still too few to bring about the change right away. Their numbers must be increased. lf what | am suggesting here can also be brought to bear in a political-organizational way, and can finally be applied in CONCERTED EXTRA-PARLIAMENTARY ACTION, the appeal has attained its goal. It is therefore a question of a NON-VIOLENT REVOLUTION, AN AL TERNATIVE BASED ON AN OPENNESS TOWARDS THE FUTURE.

The Symptoms of the Crisis We may assume that the problems which motivate us to reject the status quo are common knowledge. A brief summary will suffice to point out the main factors in the total problem.

The Military Threat Even when the superpowers harbour no aggressive intentions, there is the danger of the atomic destruction of the world. War technology and weapon arsenals, up to the point of absurdity, no longer permit a secure control of the total operation, which has become extremely complex. Despite the accumulated potential of the hundred-fold destruction of earth, the embittered arms race accelerates from year to year behind the facade of the so-called disarmament talks.

This collective insanity results in an incredible waste of energy and raw materials, and a squandering of the creative abilities of millions of people. The Ecological Crisis following pages Joseph Beuys at Palazzo Durini, Bolognano, May

1984

Our relationship to nature is characterized by the fact that it is a totally disturbed one. The complete destruction of the natural foundation on which we stand is imminent. We are well on the way to 41

destroving it in that we maintain an economic system based on the unrestrained plundering of this foundation. It must be stated very clearly that, on this point, the economic systems of private capitalism in the West and state capitalism in the East do not fundamentally differ. The destruction is a worldwide phenomenon. Between the mine and the garbage dump runs the one-way street of modern industrial civilization, whose expansive growth victimizes an ever increasing number of lifelines in the ecological system. The Economic Crisis

It has many symptoms—the daily fare of newspapers and newscasts. There are strikes and lockouts; millions (speaking worldwide) are unemployed, and cannot put their abilities to work for the community. In order to avoid having to slaughter the sacred cow, the “law of the marketplace," vast quantities of the most valuable foodstuffs, accumulated through subsidized over-production, are destroyed without batting an eyelid, while at the same time, in other parts of the world, thousands are dying of starvation. Here it is not a question of producing to satisfy the needs of consumers, but rather, a cleverly disguised waste of goods. This kind of management delivers mankind ever more systematically into the power of a clique of multinationals who, along with the top functionaries of the communist state monopolies, make decisions at their confer ence tables about the destiny of us all. Let's dispense with a further characterization of what is constantly being touted as the “monetary crisis," the “crisis of democracy," the “education crisis,’ the "energy crisis," the “crisis of the legitimacy of the state," etc. and conclude with a brief comment on the

Crisis of Consciousness and Meaning Most people feel that they are at the mercy of the circumstances in which they find themselves. This leads, in turn, to the destruction of the inner self. These people can no longer see the meaning of life within the destructive processes to which they are subject, in the complex tangle of state and economic power, in the diverting, distracting manoeuvres of a cheap entertainment industry. Young people especially are lapsing into alcoholism and drug addiction, and are committing suicide in increasing numbers. Hundreds of thousands become victims of fanatics disguised as religious people. The opposite of this loss of identity of the personality is the motto: "After me the deluge"—the reckless “living it up, the pursuit of instant gratification, a glib conformation in order to take, at least for oneself, what there is to get from the total senselessness, as long as life lasts, without considering who has to pay the bill. These are accounts which must be settled by our environment, our 44

contemporaries and future generations. It is time to replace the systems of “organized irresponsibility” with an alternative based on equilibrium and solidarity.

The Causes of the Crisis

To get back to the heart of the matter: We may say that two structural elements of the social orders that have come to power in the 20th century represent the actual causes of the total mess: MONEY and THE STATE, i.e. the roles that money and the state play within these systems. Both elements have become the decisive means to power. THE POWER IS IN THE HANDS OF THOSE WHO CONTROL THE MONEY AND/ORTHE STATE. The monetary concept of capitalism forms the basis of this system in the same way as the concept of the totalitarian state is the basis of communism as we have come to know it. Meanwhile, these two ideas have been reciprocally assimilated into the concrete manifestations of current conditions in East and West. In the West, the tendency towards an extension of the state function is gaining momentum, while in the East, aspects of the money mechanism developed by capitalism have been introduced. Although clear differences do exist between western and eastern capitalism, e.g. with regard to respect for human rights, it is nevertheless true that both systems are tending increasingly towards destructiveness, and that, through their opposing powers, they threaten the future of mankind in the extreme. For this reason, it is time that “both be replaced by a new principle," since both are "on their last legs!” Among us, too, this can only be done by a change in the constitution. The practically neurotic loyalty to the Basic Law which has developed in the interim makes us blind and incapable in face of the necessity of developing its rudiments further. In a society that has attained a certain level of democratic development, why, in fact, should requisite further development not be openly discussed? Already, far too many are afraid that they may fall under the suspicion of being enemies of the constitution. They deny themselves even creative ideas on how to extend the concepts of justice once these have been formalized, if the progress of conscience demands it. And it does.

The upshot: CAPITALISM AND COMMUNISM KIND INTO A DEAD-END STREET.

HAVE

LED MAN-

As incontestable as this is, and as widespread this insight, it is still little comfort, if no models for a solution have yet been formulated; that is, ideas for free, democratic perspectives, in solidarity with 45

nature and one's fellow man, based on foresight and a feeling of responsibility for the future of the whole. But such models have been worked out. One in particular is discussed in the following:

THE SOLUTION Wilhelm Schmundt demanded the “correction of concepts” as the central requirement of a sound alternative. Eugen Loebl, the economic theoretician of the Prague Spring, agrees with this when he speaks of the “REVOLUTION OF CONCEPTS” that cannot be postponed. Schmundt entitled one of his books Revolution and Evolution; with this, he means to say: “Only when we have effected a ‘revolution of concepts, by re-thinking the basic relationships within the social organism, will the way be open for an evolution without force and arbitrariness.”

Unfortunately, the attitude that concepts are “not the point” still lives on; often precisely in those circles that think in political alter natives. This flippant preconception must be overcome if the new social movement is to be effective and become a political force. Concepts always involve a far-reaching set of practices, and the way in which a situation is thought about is decisive for how it is handled—and before this, how and whether the situation is understood at all. In working out the alternative, i.e. the THIRD WAY (of which the Italian Communist Party, as the first communistic party, now also speaks positively), we start with the human being. He creates the SOCIAL SCULPTURE and it is according to his measure and his will that the social organism must be arranged. After feeling and recognition of human three basic needs in the forefront:

dignity, man

today puts

1. He wants to DEVELOP FREELY his abilities and his personality, and wants to apply his capabilities, in conjunction with the capabilities of his fellow man, FREELY for a purpose that is recognized as

being MEANINGFUL. 2. He sees every kind of privilege as an intolerable violation of the democratic principle of equality. He needs to count as a responsible person with regard to all rights and duties—whether in an economic, social, political or cultural context—as an EQUAL AMONG EQUALS. He must have a voice in the democratic dealings on all levels and in all areas of society.

3. He wants to GIVE SOLIDARITY AND CLAIM SOLIDARITY. That this is a prime need of contemporary man may perhaps be ques46

tioned, because egoism is by and large the dominant motivator in the behaviour of the individual. However, a conscientious investigation proves that this is not so. It is true that egoism may stand in the forefront and determine behaviour. But it is not a need, not an ideal to which people aspire. It is a drive that prevails and rules. What is desired, is MUTUAL ASSISTANCE, FREELY GIVEN. If this impulse of solidarity is understood to be the human and humane ideal, the mechanisms in our present social structure which activate the egoistic drive must be re-cast in such a way that they no longer work against man's inner intentions.

1.The “Integral System In industrial society based on a division of labour, ECONOMIC LIFE has developed into an INTEGRAL SYSTEM, as Eugen Loebl put it. This means that when people work, they leave the private sphere, the households, and stream into the associated places of production. The products of their labour no longer reach the marketplace by a barter system through individuals or guilds; rather, they get there through a concurrence of complex processes. Each end-product is the result of the joint activity of all within the framework of

the WORLD

ECONOMY.

All activities, including those of education, training, science, the banks, administration, parliaments, the media, etc. are integrated into the whole. Two processes constitute the basic structure of this type of economy: the stream of CAPABILITY VALUES, which are applied at work, and the stream of intellectual or physical CONSUMER VALUES. The technical means of product must here be considered more highly developed resources. AII work is, on principle, WORK FOR OTHERS. That means that, at a certain point, every worker makes his contribution towards the creation of an item, which in the final analysis will be used up by his fellow men. A person's work is no longer related to his consumerism. It'is equally significant that the integral system no longer permits the workers' income to be considered an index of the exchange value of their labour, since there is no longer an objective vardstick to determine an individual's contribution to the production of a particular consumer item. Similarly, the objective participation of a firm in the total product cannot be determined. If we acknowledge these realities, and do not allow ourselves to ignore them because of these interests and those disinterests, then we have to recognize that, along with the transition from the barter 47

economy (including a money trading economy) to the INTEGRAL ECONOMY the relationship of work/income has changed fundamentally. If we were to follow these realizations through to their logical conclusions, this alone would cause the current economic situation to change radically. The income that people need to maintain and develop their lives would no longer be a derived quantity, but rather a primary right, a human right that must be guaranteed in order to meet the prerequisites that will enable people to act among their coworkers in a responsible and committed way.

The democratic method of agreement, based on a point of view oriented to need, is the proper principle by which to establish income as an elementary human right. The extent and type of work must also be considered and regulated by democratic society in general and workers' collectives in particular, in accordance with their autonomous forms. This invalidates all of today's pressures, injustices and frustrations, which derive from the anachronism: “remuneration for work. Unions and employers' associations become superfluous. lf there are differences in income, they are transparent and democratically desired by all. The socio-psychological consequences of overcoming the dependence on remuneration are also positive. Nobody buys or sells abilities and work. With regard to their income, all workers belong to a democratic community of citizens with equal rights.

2.The Change in the Function of Money Just as the nature of work changed fundamentally during the transition to an integral economy, so, too, a Metamorphosis has set in the monetary processes. But in the same way as the concepts of the barter economy were retained to regulate the relationship of work/income, so too, these concepts remained decisive for the organization of the monetary system. For this reason, money could not be integrated as an ordering agent into the social organism. This has prompted many analyses of money, based on psychological, sociological, economic-theoretical and other points of view. But they have all been of little use. The power of money remained unbroken. Why? Because we did not change our concept of money when historical development would have required it. VVhat has led to the change (so far still ignored) in the function of money? This change came about with the emergence of central banking in modern monetary development. Money was no longer part of the world of economic values, in which it had previously served as the universal medium of exchange. 48

The new method of issuing and managing money through the institution of central banking led to the development of a circulation system within the social organism. Thus, like the evolutionary step in the biosphere from a lower to a higher organism, the social whole acquired a more complex form of existence. Money constituted a new functionary system. It became the ARBITER OF THE RIGHTNESS of all creative and con-

sumer processes. On the production end, firms require money to operate. They get it from the banking system in the form of credit (interest, today linked with the idea of credit, derives from a misunderstanding of the nature of money!).

In the hands of business, money = PRODUCTION CAPITAL is a document of law. It OBLIGATES firms to channel the capabilities of their workers into work. When money is put at the disposal of workers in the form of income, it changes its legal meaning. As CONSUMER CAPITAL it ENTITLES the user to acquire consumer items. The money then flows back into the production sphere and changes its meaning one more time. Now it is MONEY UNRELATED TO ECONOMIC VALUE. As such, it entitles the firms who gain itt—to nothing. With it, credits are paid off, companies' accounts are balanced at the credit banks. Since many concerns—e.g. schools and universities—do not charge for their services, the balance of accounts among the firms themselves, insofar as some have a profit and others, a deficit, must be undertaken in conjunction with association banks.

This concept of money, raised to the level of the successful social evolution, has sweeping repercussions. lt solves the problem of power insofar as it is based on the monetary aspect.

following pages Joseph Beuys in his estate in Veert (Holland), Easter 1975

Because of the refusal to recognize that monetary regulations were no longer part of economic life, but had become an independent functionary system in the area of law, the old Roman concept of private ownership could survive without restriction. So also the categories of profit and loss could become operational. The unrestricted appropriation of everything involved with the production sites remained legitimate. On the other hand, the recognition of the transformed monetary concept leads, without a single civic measure or fiscal exercise, towards the abolition of the ownership as well as the profit principle in the production sphere. And what becomes of the stock exchange, land speculations, usury, inflation? They disappear, as do the hostages of unemployment. The world of stocks passes away overnight, without causing even one gear to grind. And the stockholders, the speculators, the big 49

.

-

Ra

eta ni

È

-

°

nsa

*

gra A dai

-

#

cali tifiisfa xa LS =

e i

landowners? Will they present their holy riches to mankind on the sacrificial altar of the dawning new age? We shall see. In any case, everyone will find his place in society, where he can apply his abilities for the benefit of the whole in a free, productive and meaningful way. With regard to consumerism, production will be in accordance with consumer need. No profit or ownership interests inhibit or divert this, the only proper economic goal. The fraternity that has already reached an elementary stage within the integral system—"Work is, on principle, work for others"—can evolve without hindrance. A new light is cast on the ecological question as well. Economic ecology is selfevident, when a free science, liberal education and open information systems comprehensively research and disseminate the laws of life and illuminate their significante for man.

3.The Form of Freedom of the Sociological Organism \Ve might consider entrusting the State with the management of social development, were it not for the fact that this stands in radical contradiction to the freedom impulse, to the demand for selfdetermination, self-responsibility and self-government (decentralization). For this reason, the last Important question that arises in conjunction with the concept of the evolutionary alternative of the Third Way—"How can a society freed of constraints find its developmental direction, oriented to human needs and physical necessities?"—can only be answered with a description of the “form of freedom of the social organism” (Schmundt) On the one hand, freedom is an individual impulse to act according to self-determined motives. On the other hand, self-determined action is free only if it occurs “with insight into the conditions of life of the whole" (Rudolf Steiner). For the complex interrelationships within our production, which is based on a division of labour, this means that the individual, or the individual firm, can only with great difficulty discern, on its own, how the task—to produce something for the needs of others—can best be accomplished. Thus it is necessary to incorporate into the body of society a new functionary system: the SYSTEM OF ADVISORY TRUSTEES, an authentic counsellor-system as a constant source of inspiration.

Every worker's collective can best gain an insight of the conditions, relationships and effects of its actions if it appoints a board of trustees in which the democratically authorized management of the 52

firm discusses the purposes, goals and development of the firm, from the most comprehensive viewpoint possible, with leading personalities of other companies, banks, scientific research institutions and also representatives of its consumer groups. Those responsible in each case must make the decisions. Through the assistance of the trustees, these decisions will be supported by an optimally objective perception of the situation.

What holds true for the associations of workers' collectives among themselves also plays a role in the basic structure of a single free concern. Once the antithesis of “employer” and “employee” is overcome, the field is open for a social structure in which process-

es of FREE CONSULTATION, DEMOCRATIC DEALING, and finally, a JOINT EFFORT for the social environment are interwoven. Everyone has the right to free entreprenurial initiative, because man is an enterprising being. lt is necessary that managers have the capacity to call upon their co-workers in accordance with their professional competence and expertise. This function, however, will bring them neither material privileges nor any other form of power that is not democratically legitimate. Thus, within the framework of the Third Way, FREE ENTERPRISE in a self-administrated economy and self-governed culture is the democratic base unit in a post-capitalistic and post-communistic NEW SOCIETY OF REAL

SOCIALISM. The law-giving, ruling and administrative activities of the state are limited to the function of determining the democratic rights and duties applicable to all, and of putting them into practice. The state will shrink considerably. VVe shall see what remains.

THE WAYS TO CHANGE What can we do now to bring about the alternative? \Vhoever considers this image of the evolutionary alternative will have a clear fundamental understanding of the SOCIAL SCULPTURE which is shaped by MAN AS ARTIST. Whoever says that a change is necessary, but skips over the “revolution of concepts” and attacks only the external manifestations of the ideologies, will fail. He will either resign, content himself with reforming, or end up in the dead-end street of terrorism. All three

are forms of the victory of the system's strategy. If we ask in conclusion, therefore: WHAT CAN WE DO? in order to actually reach the goal of a new form from the ground up, we have 53

to recognize that there is only one way to transform the status quo—but it requires a wide spectrumof measures. The only way is the NON-VIOLENT TRANSFORMATION. Non-violent, but not, indeed, because violence does not appear promising at a given time or for particolar reasons. No. Non-violence on principle, on human, intellectual, moral and socio-political grounds. On the one hand, the dignity of man stands and falls with the inviolabilità of the person, and whoever disregards this, steps down from the level of humanity. On the other hand, it is precisely those systems which must be transformed that are built on force of every thinkable kind. Thus the use of any kind of force constitutes an expression of behaviour that conforms to the system, i.e. that reinforces what it wants to dissolve. This appeal is an encouragement and exhortation to go the way of the non-violent transformation. Those who have been passive so far, although filled with uneasiness and dissatisfaction, are called upon to BECOME ACTIVE. Your activity is perhaps the only thing which can lead those who are active, but are flirting with the tools of violence, or who already use violence, back to the route of nonviolent action. Although the “revolution of concepts” described above is the essential factor in the means to change that is outlined here, it is not necessarily the first step. Nor can it claim absoluteness. Whoever has the capability of thinking through the theories of Marxism, liberalism, the Christian social teaching, etc. will realize that these theories certainly come to the same conclusions as we do. Today it is necessary to think the historical initiatives through to their conclusions. Where this has been done courageousily, it is noticeable how the fronts shift. Then Bahro is closer to Karl-Hermann Flach and William Borm than these are to their party colleague Lambsdorff, and closer than he, in turn, was to his associates, who arrested and condemned him.

Free International University The process of conversion of inveterate abstract concepts is in full swing. It must lead to a GREAT DIALOGUE: to inter-factionary, interdisciplinary and international communication between the alternative theoretical solutions. The FREE INTERNATIONAL UNIVERSITY (free college for creativity and inter-disciplinary research) offers a constant opportunity to organize and develop this communication. Against the concentrated interests of the powerful, only a compelling idea, one at least as strong as the humanistic concepts of the last centuries and the Christian concepts of the first centuries of our time, stands a chance. We need a constant and comprehensive 54

dialogue to develop this “compelling idea” from the various beginnings spawned by the new social movement. The FREE INTERNATIONAL UNIVERSITY, as the organizational focus of this research, work and communication, therefore signifies all the groups and basic units in our society in which people have gathered to consider jointly the questions of our social future. The more people who involve themselves in this work, the more strongly and effectively the alternative ideas will be brought to bear. Therefore the appeal is

sounded: FOUND WORK CENTRES OF THE FREE INTERNATIONAL UNIVERSITY, the university of the people. Third Way Action But this alone is not yet enough. Wherever possible, we should decide to PRACTISE alternative life and work styles. Many have made a start, of limited scope and in special areas. The THIRD WAY CONSTRUCTION INITIATIVE ACTION (business association, endowment, membership organization), is a consolidation of alternative economic and cultural enterprises. Individual groups or businesses that want to put their alternative ideas into practice are called upon to support this project. A final, topical aspect, perhaps, the most important and decisive for the way of non-violent transformation. How can the new social movement attain a political dimension?

Union for the New Democracy This raises the question of the possibility of parliamentary action, at least within the western democracies. If we follow this path, we do right only if we develop a new style of political work and political organizing. Only if we practise this new style will we overcome the obstacles—restrictive clauses and the like—that are erected in the way of alternative developments. In any case, it would be necessary that alternative models for a solution arise from the parliaments as well, to be perceptible to the public at large. But to do this, people who have worked out such models have to get into the parliaments. How will they do this? By concentrating their entire strength on a JOINT ELECTORAL INITIATIVE.

How the total alternative movement is understood is decisive for such an effort. After all, the movement comprises many streams, initiatives, organizations, institutions, etc. Only in solidarity do they all stand a chance. Joint electoral initiative does not mean old-style party organization, party platform, party debate. The unity that is required can only be a UNITY INTHE MANIFOLD. The citizens’ initiative movement, the ecological, freedom, and women's movements, the movement of operational models, the 55

movement for a democratic socialism, a humanistic liberalism, a Third Way, the anthroposophical movement and the Christian-denominational oriented streams, the civil rights movement and the Third World movement must recognize that they are indispensable components of the total alternative movement; parts that do not exclude or contradict one another, but are mutually complementary. In reality, there are alternative

concepts

and

initiatives that are

Marxistic, Catholic, protestant, liberal, anthroposophical, ecological, etc. In many essential points they already agree to a large ex tent. This is the basis of solidarity in the unit. In other areas, there is disagreement. This is the basis of freedom within the unit. A joint electoral initiative of the total alternative movement is only realistic in the form of an ALLIANCE of many autonomous groups, whose relationship among themselves and towards the public is defined by a spirit of ACTIVE TOLERANCE. Our parliaments need the liberating spirit and the life of such a union, the UNION FOR THE NEW DEMOCRACY. The vehicles that will take the new route are ready to roll. They offer space and work for all. Author of the appeal: Joseph Beuys Frankfurter Rundschau

December 23, 1978

The appeal must be spread far and wide. But in order to attain this goal we need as many signatures as possible. All those who support what is stated in the appeal and are willing to sign it should let us know and send in a contribution (to cover the publication costs). Achberg Institute for Social Research of the FI.U., Postscheckamt Munchen, Konto Nr. 287995-809; Volksbank Wangen i. Allgàu, Konto Nr. 35119004. (Note: this Appeal was launched in Italy in the Annuario Il Clavicembalo 1979-1980 by Lucrezia De Domizio) There are three essential points in the Appeal that we need to think about. The first provides a general picture of the symptoms of the crisis that has been under way for some time now in our society; symptoms that, according to Beuys, stem from forms of Capitalism and Com-

munism.

The second essential point is this: Beuys insists first and foremost on a retreating into oneself, which means reacquiring one's own intellectual independence, and thus developing an innovative and radical outlook on reality; in particular, this means allowing one's ideas to get down to work so that an actual revolution can take place inside each

one of US.

56

The only true revolution is the revolution of ideas, and as regards social behaviour this can only be followed by evolution. Hence, Beuys believes that the position of the person who resorts to violence to change the system is undeniably mistaken. The third point is Unity in Diversity, that is, in terms of cooperation, what Beuys understands to be the essential attitude for anyone seriously bent on being dedicated to a truly alternative action.

Reflections. Seductive Human Capacity Man gropes in the dark because he believes that an energy-generating engine no longer exists. This is not true, because the real spiritual, economic and social generator lies in man capacity to seduce.

In the Sunday supplement to // Sole 24 Ore published on July 12, 2009 the article by Armando Messeri reports that Amartya Sen, Nobel Prize for Economics, overcomes all the approaches to the various social issues, such as human rights, inequality, goods resources, etc., by concentrating on the capacities that characterize individuals so that they can obtain the goods they deem to be most important. Joseph Beuys, the renowned German Master, one of the most emblematic figures of international Art history after the Second World War, and well before Sen's time, actually as early as the 1970s, had already stated: Only man ability to think is capable of giving the world new causes.

following pages Joseph Beuys, cover of the book /ncontro con Beuys, 1983-1984

But the real concepts within which Beuys worked are a mixture of Economics and Culture, or better still, a correct approach to the economy through an authentically pedagogic action (the topic is dealt with more in detail in the Third Station). Beuys always believed that the most important problem in today's age was to be searched for in the field of economics, not in culture, meaning by this production, where the distribution and consumption of products take place. The cultural area must be organically integrated with this process of circulation. Unfortunately, however, Economices and Culture today are completely separate from each other. But in Beuys's mind, Economics and Culture are closely intertwined, as man's activity and capacity to produce are essentially facts that concern culture. Likewise, all of the aspects that the world of economics presents, in the organization and functioning of its structures, should not be considered a field reserved for specialists, but rather should be related to the life of all men and thus become a universal cultural heritage. The document written by the Free International University: Azione Terza Via - Iniziativa Promozionale. Idea e tentativo pratico per realizzare una alternativa ai sistemi sociali esistenti nell'Occidente e nell’Oriente (Promotional Initiative. Idea and Practical Attempt at Producing an Alternative to Existing Social Systems in the West and East) is a publication some eighty pages long that addresses a number of 57

-

EU cl

”

"peo

DASRUZIO

bi

f

i Kos

| i

nou

F.I.Ù | DIFESA DELLA MA er MONTERA CANO DAI

issues concerning work and the economy. This red booklet, published The publication deals in 1978, was translated into several languages. ” (this topic economy “new the of aspects specific and with different Station). Fifth the in clarified and length at d will be discusse

Economic pathology

If the goal of historical research is an understanding of the present, then we might say that this analysis has practically come to an end. In this day and age we need to make an in-depth sociological analysis of the responsibilities and issues concerning new ways of living that are emerging among people all over the world. We cannot forsake dealing with the economy, which has become “pathological” throughout contemporary society, which acts as if it were gripped by a neurotic “fit” where greed for money is becoming a “virus” that touches upon every aspect of our daily lives. \Ve need to show an interest in all those aspects that have led man to losing human values and his Memory, to the wasting of time and to the absence of consciousness and deep understanding. Superficiality has become a System. We need to analyze the reasons that have caused man to forget the essential principles of his Mother Nature, and have thus transformed him into a being without qualities (in 7Yhe Man Without Qualities, Austrian writer Robert Musil's unfinished novel, a seminal work, dealt with the substratum of the quality of man). For Musil the moral meanIng of an action is always influenced by the field of energy or the constellation of circrumstances. The System we live in frees itself of its promoters and is transformed into a mechanism that no human force is capable of arresting. This automatism constitutes the sinister aspect of contemporary Capitalism, it is the demoniacal imprint that terrifies us in Balzac's description of it. As the means of success escape the sphere of individual influence, uncertainty, i.e. the feeling of no longer having any reference points if not “the Money god,’ that is, being slaves to money, is getting worse and worse in mankind. And the more personal interests spread and become more intricate, the more savage, desperate, brutish the struggle gets. Everybody is fighting everybody else, each one of us is standing at the front line of a neverending war, an all-out war, | dare to say a “total” one. In the end, we find ourselves faced with rivals, adversaries, enemies, envious men who will use any means available to them to achieve power, wealth, hegemony. Man feels separate from the past.

I wonder what it is that keeps man from self-understanding, from facing his everyday existence constructively? These are questions that this Society, unfortunately, has only one answer for: the possession of having. Back in 1977 in To Have or to Be? Erich Fromm began from the evils of the world and by way of a very clear analysis outlined the possibility of a different attitude of a new 60

Man towards Nature and Society, touching upon those authentically productive and creative activities which the great Masters of life and thought, from Jesus to Buddha, from Thomas Aquinas to Spinoza, from Marx to Schweitzer and on up to the German Master Joseph Beuys, have all talked about. In no other sector of the figurative Arts has there been such a clean break with works from the past, negatively touching on all the facets of human existence, as there has been in 21st-century Art. | have often written that the true artist is he who “is nourished by what society condemns, excludes, sets aside and forgets/ and convinced by my daily experiences, to this | add that the artist possesses the capacity to create new relationships, new ideas, to have unusual intuitions, to move away from traditional schemes, to bring Nature closer to Man, to perceive situations or have ideas which are normally incompatible with reality, that only the artist knows how to conjugate; see how Galileo took the world by storm by using for astronomy "toy telescopes” that had been invented by Dutch opticians... Well then, | wonder why artists at this moment in history above all identify with all those unpropitious realities mentioned above? lf the thirst for economic power is so uncontrollable as to also pollute the spirituality of Art, isn't it perhaps an indication of the lack of creative commitment on the part of the artist? And yet even at the start of the 20th-century creativity developed in our society in a very surprising way in all of the elements constituting techne, thereby producing a multiplicity of productive processes that at the beginning led man to the development of and the improvement in his human condition. Thereafter, unfortunately, Technology turned into mental and behavioural interdependence. All the means produced by techne, and which man is a complete slave to, i.e. television, mobile phones, computers, cars and other things, are only an extreme example of the phenomenon of a more general usurpation of human capacity, of an autonomous action capable of bestowing meaning on man's own world. Hence, it is important to analyze the broader meanings in which man has begun to surrender his own independence to a world seen as a machine... A machine that, however much it may be efficient, could never be as perfect as the human body. The problem with man today is his lack of common sense, his inability to have a general vision in existential terms. This major flaw is the cause of age-old problems in human relations. “The knowledge that you seek merely to enhance your knowledge, merely to store up treasures for yourself, will lead you astray from your road; but the knowledge that you seek in order to ennoble mankind and advance the development of the world will carry you a step forward” (Rudolf Steiner) Art, and we might say artists as well, at this particular moment in time, more than ever feel the need for a psychological revision. | believe that psychologists today can more than ever before be use61

ful to Culture because the object of the observations of Psychology are the facts of human behaviour that it analyzes and explores.

| believe that these are the three conditions that create a climate that is favourable to the creative growth of man and more specifically to the man-artist. The first condition is the congruity that has to do with authenticity. The more the man-artist is himself in his relationship with the life he chooses, the greater the chances are that there will be a development in a creative/constructive manner. It is with this attitude that he can openly think about feelings and the dispositions that flow inside him moment by moment. The term transparency clearly expresses the essence of this openness: the more the man-artist is clear in relation to what he does and what he creates, the more he transmits the harmony between thinking and behaving via his “operation,’ thus conveying passion and charisma at a conscious level. The beneficiary perceives just how deep the process of ideas that belong to the artist's research are, he becomes a participant in that indefinite, magical, trans-sensorial quid that the artist communicates as an experience that flows from within, from the depth of his soul and from his strong thought. VVhen this doesn't happen, then the “meaning” stems from the fragility of the typology of Art, chiefly from the author's weak thought. It also needs to be said that Art requires a slow and constant anthropological sedimentation, a development that in the long run can metaphorically represent the growth of a seed in the plant world. In terms of interpersonal politics, the artist and the beneficiary are released from the archetypes and from the control of models set up for the defence of the Self, and discover both these things in the reciprocal diverse psychological conditions of freedom itself. A strongwilled freedom, a choice determined by knowledge that, day after day, leads to self-possession and at the same time determines a transubstantiation between knowledge and creativity, between aesthetics and ethics, between the unconscious and freedom. Hence, what is determined is a communication that is in close harmony between what is perceived at the level of thinking and what is specific knowledge through a unanimous and free collaboration. The “freedom of spirit” that Georg W. Hegel calls “absolute freedom” is that voyage into space where there is nothing below us and nothing above us and where we are completely alone with ourselves. The second condition concerns a very important attitude required to create a climate that is suited to change: i.e. acceptance or positive condition, that is, unconditioned esteem or acceptance. Indeed, when the artist possesses congruity, thus, when there is no discrepancy between public and private, it is very likely that what takes place is a therapeutic process or, better still, a modification in the beneficiary in understanding the work of art, or rather, in broader terms, the knowledge of Art. Clearly, this means a complete openness in the encounter, regardless of the various feelings that might at that moment be dwelling in the psyche: confusion, hostility, courage, love, fear, pride, presumptuousness. 62

At this point it is necessary to stress the fact that the availability of Art is unconditionedì; l'd say that it is Arts democratic duty to make itself accessible to all those who feel the need to develop their own knowledge. Even love for the artist can be helpful, because it is never of the possessive sort. The process of the artistic work is an abstraction through which the artist reveals the essential core, common to many representations, so that the work becomes autonomous, a synthetic image, a concept that tends to make the visible invisible. It is impossible for all men to be willing to unconditionally accept Art, just as not all artists, because they are human beings too, are without utilitarian deviations, which is what we are paradoxically witnessing in this age. Allow me to repeat: it is an art that is paradoxically sickened by excessive economic greed. It is also true that Art, like all disciplines, professions, trades is elitist (in the sense of specific knowledge), but it does possess a privilege: it distinguishes itself from all other systems because it makes use, for its own necessary perception, of man's sensitivity. Sensitivity is the first signal that reveals a kind of observing that thinks, that questions itself, it is the first emotional, immediate step needed to move closer to Art. Consequently, it will be possible to explore a mute suggestion along the path that will one step at a time lead to a broader vision of life, a conception that will unfailingly surround man in a sphere, an ectoplasm from which he will never be able to emerge. And sooner or later the world will become aware of genius; it is not a temporal question like the perversion for gold, but it is the splendour of the colour yellow that shines its own light and bestows warmth and light on all the contours of the Universe. I ask myself what the interpersonal politics of such an attitude might be? It is a very effective factor, but it is neither characterized by manipulation, control, or relationship, nor does it imply any judgement or evaluation. The power of the existence of Art and the Artist is left entirely in the hands of History. History made up of teachings, where understanding is the product of quality, a science of time, where social incidences and creative cycles merge, the unique fate of that scientific dimension that reflects the complex involvement of the present serving the future. Hence, in time, a pedagogic atmosphere is autonomously created that fosters the growth and development of the new generations, thus generating discussions on new hierarchical models, destabilizing a common typology of ephemeral living. Revolutionaries are considered dangerous—and for the established order they unquestionably are—but if we reread Ve Are the Revolution in the correct Beuysian term, we will better understand how with a sharp, clean cut of the umbilical cord we implement the detachment of orthodox labels and acquire the freedom to direct ourselves and others towards a pain-free therapy aimed at improving understanding. Under standing in the sense of a tool used for communication and growth. An in-depth examination of understanding would get us involved in a vast and generally very active area, discussed in many writings by the great figures of history, something which goes beyond the aim of this note. 63

The third condition consists in empirica! knowledge. Clearly, the psychological effects caused by the trauma of such a radical shift from utilitarian manipulation to transcendental culture will not necessarily be wholly evident in all those who yearn to embrace what | have underscored in the elements cited, but | believe that it is an attempt to solve several psychological problems that | have perceived in the ego of a social system that acts as a communicating vessel in contemporary culture. Empirical knowledge refers to the capacity to perceive Art and the Artist in the deepest, most transparent, most truthful sense. In this sense, /earningbecomes possible in a relatively short amount of time, because knowing, knowledge, is transformed into awareness. With greater sensitivity and empathy it is possible to transform one's vision of life, one's way of conceiving relationships and personal attitudes, and with the practice of Art they will always be more authentic and at the same time more available. It is also true that an empathic attitude implies a radical choice that leads to close attention, to a more accurate study, to an everincreasing awareness that might even seem forced, but in truth as time goes by, it becomes indispensable, irreversible. | dare say that Art leads us towards a sort of courageous training whose pathway becomes the only reason for existence. One might wonder why it is that a person who approaches Art or ex periences it intensely is positively transformed when he is involved in the relationship with all those elements contained in culture. Over the years | have met scholars of the human psyche; from the great figures of Art | have learned how to understand a few of the important perceptions of being. Based on my many experiences | have observed the process of transformation of the psyche and of society with everincreasing clarity. | have managed to perceive and consider the various obscure aspects expressed by human beings and that at the same time | have identified in the various articulations of culture. The autonomous development of individual creative faculties presupposes the formalization of spiritual functions; but this all begins when one no longer judges actions solely in terms of practical utility, but also in terms of their intrinsic perfection. To all of this | might add that ever since | was a young girl | have nurtured a certain inner sympathy for music and poetry, but | have been especially drawn to Art, from Figuration to Abstraction and to contemporary Conceptual art, and this has been a cornerstone of the way | have lived my life. My love for Art has been a sort of last resort in my ability to have a greater control over myself and in developing my specific knowledge. From a political standpoint, | can safely say that by paying attention to inner feelings, Culture, and more specifically Art, by removing his inhibitions, the man-artist becomes

his own master and therefore has

a greater chance of defining himself. VVhen, in cases that are becoming increasingly rare, an artist possesses in toto the specific knowledge of a specific discipline and practises it with his innate creativity, he transfers it into the field of Art so that 64

following pages Joseph Beuys at Villa Durini, San Silvestro Colli, Pescara 1973

freedom to create then becomes the awareness of a natural way that provides a direction for one's own organism. He combines deep knowledge with the creative act, and by creating the Work, achieves a peak where he can foretell cultural “models” that were never tested before. The artist sees things that others can't understand, revealing himself totally in both theoretical and aesthetic terms, which he then uses as a framework for the purpose of greater evolutionary attention. Beuys is unique in this way of visualizing Art. In this sense, the artist indicates how the role of an atypical paradigm, of a new “model” sets into motion a dual human potential: knowledge and creativity, in addition to showing how this approach is a phenomenon in which the psyche interacts and compares two apparently contradictory elements, once again reveal the possibility of a transcendence bound more to thought than to form. The communicative processes are analyzed in their interactive complexity in the relationship between Art and Knowledge. In particular, the meta-communication dimension shows how each transmission of messages is qualified by verbal expressions according to a semantic convention, but also by the artistic operation by means of specific codes based on visual elements capable of influencing the modali ties of interpersonal relations. In a world where even art is submitted to different compromises, it is easy to imagine which forms of constriction such an innovative operation will have to be submitted to. According to the theories of liberal aesthetics in style, coercion relentlessly frustrates an autonomous spiritual activity. Unfortunately, each artistic desire will have to find a path for itself between the links of a close-knit network; this is the way it has always been, but in this day and age, when the economy has become pathological, it is a huge problem for the artist who turns his own artistic exploration in the direction of transcendence. Each work of art springs from the tension between the artist's intentions and the resistance he encounters in social prejudice, in critical insufficiency and, even more so, in political intrusions, resistance that becomes even worse when the artist won't accept the compromises that in today's society have become a sort of unitary wisdom, an undifferentiated condition. Art History is filled with examples that clearly show how the artist is useful to the cause of progress, not so much because of his convictions and sympathies, but because of the power with which he has been able to represent the problems and contradictions of real society. In this regard, it is interesting to read the discussion between the artist and economist Vitantonio Russo on the theme of the Foundation of the Institute for the Rebirth of Agriculture and the German Master Joseph Beuys which took place in Pescara's Borsa Merci on February 12, 1978 when Beuys presented the FI.U. (Free International University) and the famous report entitled Terza Via - Iniziativa promozionale. Idea e tentativo pratico per realizzare una alternativa ai sistemi sociali esistenti nell'Occidente e nell'Oriente. To get a better understanding of the relationship between the two artists | believe that it would be useful to give a broader overview of the discussion between the two. 65

Joseph Beuys: /n this intervention it seems to me as being impor tant to first of all state something which in some ways bears upon a philosophical aspect. In Mediterranean countries, and more so than in others, one often notes an uncertainty in distinguishing between ideology and idea. To bear in mind this element within critical consciousness as something essential—-l would say revolutionary in the ideological sphere—is important in order to understand the “Free International University” regarding what is really “new” about it. Our whole economic and political life is at present dominated by ideology and in the first place the makers of this are political parties. This explains the real meaning of the “Free International University,” an institution which intends to develop an alternative to the existing systems, be these in the Western or the Eastern Block, both with regard to private as well as to state capitalism. Both of these political systems have been structured upon an ideology which insists on three elements: profit, property (ownership) and dependence on a salary or wage. It is important to know the difference which lies between what the political parties want (and in general those involved in politics) and what the “Free International University” intends to do as a phenomenologicaliy open and tolerant alternative which, principally speaking, sees a creative being in every person. This is the result of a profound conviction on my part: that no other revolutionary force exists other than the creative power of people, of every person as an artist, and that this affirmation is not abstract but can be proved when one gets rid of ideology from the “field.” This affirmation is confirmed by the fact that the concepts change whenever they are freed from their ideological “wrapping” and one arrives at their phenomenological nucleus. Such a broadened concept of art is something quite different from the traditional bourgeois concept. In fact, the latter is applied in the so-called art businesses, primarily in museums, galleries and the art markets; it structures the methodological activity of critics and art historians and, in a complementary fashion, also art education as taught in schools, academies, etc. lt seems evident to me that inside these institutions it is impossible to develop an anthropological concept of art which makes reference to every person. It is important for such a concept of creativitr—and, consequentily, of art itself—to be included within consciousness so that people gradually experiment the validity of the individual intention of self-determination. With a will of this kind it becomes perfectly clear that it is necessary to carry on some political battles for people to be able to achieve their ability of being creative—that is, artists—in freedom. In order to achieve all of this it is necessary to have a form of free education. In fact, it is absurd to think of a system in which self-determination living hand in hand with repression is capable of freeing people. It is clear that | am talking about the cultural system which is in the hands of the State, both in Western

Europe with its private capitalism as

in Eastern Europe with its State capitalism. The consequence of a broadened or extended concept of culture, referring to all people and

all problem spheres, is the development of an idea of creativity as 68

the main spiritual-capital. Therefore, if the concept of art is socialized in these terms then it is necessary to bear this modification in mind in such a way as to show the absurdity of the fact that the economic concept is exclusively individuated where physical products are produced. In having clarified that this extended concept of art effects all the fields of the social organism, because it is a question of transformation, it becomes absurd—and one can no longer understand— Just how come those work collectives which produce these spiritual goods, which produce creative and spiritual capital, must live under a condition of repression, depending on the State and political parties. In what, then, does the “new” consist, in the apparition of the “new” society? That it is possible to arrive at a knowledge of human work lacking in prejudices. The question, here, is that of freeing ourselves from ideologies, from prejudices regarding human work and from the owner ship of the means of production and the matters involved in the same production. All of this constitutes the apparatus of a power abuse on the part of the few who use this situation in order to exploit people and destroy the socialism which at an embryonic level already exists in people. Consequently, we have to acknowledge that what today Is such a negative factor in work is nothing other than the interaction of these three fundamental principles: profit, ownership and salary/ wage dependency. These ideas have been introduced by way of the concrete implementation of a materialistic concept, a concept also specified in its sci ence. For example, we can take the manipulation or scientific act of Adam Smith who mainly developed the principle of economics based on the exchange of money. Underlying this economic principle is that work is exchanged for money and the service rendered by a person becomes a good. That these artificial and historical developments are necessary at the end is something certain. It is for this reason that one has to rethink what exists today. Money, for example, which today organizes work on the basis of the principle of money as means of exchange, is an element which has to undergo a transformation and development, an evolution upwards, coming out of its position as identification of the good and of a corresponding fixed economic value. This money has to be transformed into a juridical regulator. That is, money must become a juridical document in such a way as to become the elementary expression of democracy. In consequence of such a necessary truth, in such a rethinking, the entire banking system would be transformed into a democratic figure of law. This juridical document accompanying people's work processes is not the real economic factor whereas the real capital is art, that is, people's creativity, and it becomes clear that this concrete capital is

simply accompanied by a juridical document. This money which creates obligations on the part of producers—the obligation to invest in human work or to invest human capability in work—could, as its first consequence, avoid unemployment. On the other hand, we have the person who takes his or her earnings and, by way of money as a ju69

ridical document, has the right to receive goods. The essential characteristics of this juridical document constituting money are, on the one hand, to oblige producers and, on the other, to legitimize the consumer to purchase goods. Therefore, from the moment that it constitutes a juridical document and not an economic value, following the purchase money loses whatever value (both in the sense of capital and as regards the product and, moreover, as a document lacking value, following the purchase it returns into the

central network of the banks). An original and new juridical act is therefore necessary in order to give back some value to money. Starting out from the principle that money is essentially a juridical document, we have understood that nothing comes from it. Consequently, given that money comes from nothing it proves to be an ideal regulator of human relationships. Here in Pescara, with the “Free International University” and all those people who are connected to this initiative, we wanted to open an “Institute for the Rebirth of Agriculture”: an act of foundation which in practice is celebrated in this very moment. A founding act which goes to join existing experiences of work collectives to be found in Ger many, Scotland, Ireland and Holland and which for the global interest here, in this geographical and historical place (Pescara), implements the idea of creating this Institute for the Rebirth of Agriculture. In order to achieve this aim it has been necessary to convey this somewhat schematic idea with regards to how the economy can be developed according to criteria and ways which are completely different. It is necessary for people, especially those engaged in agriculture, to have a prospect, a hope, because it is an absurdity that in order to satisfy their own vital needs they have to emigrate and leave their land for a slightly higher wage. To better evidence this it is sufficient to break with everything which is taking place at present on a political level, and concerning agriculture in particular. I have been asked to finally get to the question of agriculture although | think that this is a misunderstanding because we have been talking about agriculture for some time. It is easy to say a few interesting things about agriculture but if one has not first presented the whole economic picture then it only seems to be an exercise in private amusement.

On the contrary,

| have wanted to create the context

with the overall question of the social and economic situations. In my opinion it is interesting to say that it is not correct to only “pine away” in ideal contexts. This is the point in which it appears necessary to apply the fruit of the previous analysis. Only then will people have trust in ideas. V/hen people see that they can concretely intervene—for example—vvithin the agricultural sphere. It is a welkknown fact that to manipulate human energies in the main means dealing with psychic energies (in education, for example) and that this act faithfully follows the technique of the manipulation of ex ternal energies (electricity, for example). However, we also know that all of this starts out from concepts which for a long time now have basically shown themselves to be in disagreement. So with regards to agriculture, let us now see how a materialistic 70

and scientific thought works, such as that of the present-day political system with its one-dimensional organization. This thought imagines what takes place in agriculture and in the plant as being something which is purely mechanical. In other words, within a conception of vital principles reduced to the sole mechanical point of view. The plant itself appears as a simple machine: suffice to nourish it with something and it will subsequently grow and give people food to eat. The principle of profit in the capitalist system sees nothing else, with the result that the race to make a profit only wants to see industrialization in the biological field where also here one wants to make profit. VVith a similar act of manipulation regarding the vital principles of animals, plants and the land itself the entire mineralization and sterilization of the Earth taken as a whole appears clear. Vhat one chemically produces are degenerated elements and irrespective of the extent to which mankind has emancipated itself from an initial weakness vis-à-vis poisons, it has also ended up degenerating this same emancipation. An alternative technology or an alternative course of action in agriculture are always questions of energy, although examined from another scientific viewpoint. In this sense the plant, animals and the land are not observed in mechanistic terms. Rather, one sees the energy contexts in which they live. In this acquisition of consciousness mankind “wins” an eye in order to see better. So as to individuate in essentialness those same elements which constitute the raw materials of agriculture, elements which can be localized in the layer of the land which is closest to mankind. Only then will mankind become aware that this living being, which is made up of this vital layer, is very much more delicate than is man himself with respect to these chemical and physical influences. These “new” men find it interesting—for example—to talk with an old peasant who still preserves the awareness that the true nourishment of plants is not through chemical products but also depends on the position/phases of the moon and the planetary constellation. This evidences that there once existed a knowledge about these energies, a culture, which today we have to rediscover in order to begin a technological age worthy of the name. Instead of this concept which today holds sway in agriculture, aimed at exploitation on the basis of an explosive and mechanistic principle, we have to arrive at an implosive principle which considers all energies, also those surrounding the plant in its cosmic extension. Only then will it become possible to inaugurate a technological age which really works on behalf of mankind. Basically speaking, the question of agriculture appears like a religious question because as soon as we broaden our Sight and also look at the mankind's invisible aims and goals, then we also glimpse the invisible ends of the plant, its being put within an entire universe which envelops it on a cosmic level. Only then will mankind see that this is its only system of alimentation. Only then will it realize that fertilizer, in the final analysis, depends on the stars and consequently on an immaterial grandness. The age of a chemical agriculture, with the sole effect of poisoning the Earth, must come to an end, so that something 71

can be born which allows people to live and which does not oblige them to die. At this point | think it is the case to answer questions and more fully get into the discussion. Firstly, however, | would once again like to give the premise that what has been said here is the result of research works and reflections that have been carried out within the sphere of the “Free International University” which today we want to present in Italy. You can also take a free booklet in which we have summarized this theoretical picture of ours, with particular reference to economic concepts and to the concept of Money which are, in their turn, the presupposition for a healthy initiative within the field of agriculture. Iwant to add that itis not the case to take the contents of this booklet as a dogma but quite simply as the presentation of a research result which wishes to animate the discussion. It is not material in which one has to believe but it is something which it is necessary to examine in a very critical way so as to propose suitable modifications— and, why not, also the proposal of improvements. The material is therefore presented in this so-called “red paper"— in this red booklet—because it contains a radical revolutionary programme. In this red booklet we have described the results of a research work which it is necessary to consider as the German contribution to this problem that effects the whole of Europe. This is a contribution which we have furnished on the basis of the existing conditions in the German Federal Republic. It is an attempt at describing all the most advanced and updated thought of the present time. You will also find the address of one of the work collectives of the FI.U. together with a bank account number. However, there must be no misunderstanding here. Precisely this foundation we are establishing today—the “Fondazione per la Rinascita dell'Agricoltura” is— we wish to underline—for Italian agriculture. lt has to have its centre in Pescara and all the financial contributions collected will remain in Italy. They will not go to Germany. | still want to say a few words by way of presentation of what we intend to do with this Institute. Firstly, we only want to compile an inventory of the initiatives which already exist in Italy with reference to agricultural experiments or directed towards an alternative technology. In this Institute we want to gather together everything which ex ists in Italy in such a way as to prepare a data bank (information bank), a bank of ideas regarding everything connected to the regeneration of agriculture in order to improve communication and cooperation between the various initiatives already existing in Italy. The creation of a real network between people and initiatives which regard an alter native agriculture. In the first place we want to refer to what already exists. VVe want to collect and elaborate all the attempts aimed at a dynamic biological cultivation, questions referring to the ecology of water, etc. Later we shall start up international collaboration between the various experimental situations developed in different European countries in such a way as to create permanent communication havIng a very precise scientific character in order to compare the various models in relation to their ability to achieve the goals established be72

Joseph Beuys

at Vallée de Mai, Diary of Seychelles, December 1980

forehand, at the same time organizing the political struggle outside this pragmatic field. Perhaps in a not too distant future all of the initiatives will be able to be further developed on a multinational front: in the fields of town planning, pedagogy, money, the economy and so forth and then, as a consequence, also the questions regarding democracy and laws. I think it is a quite reasonable instinct which suggests we not only go back to the basis with our work but that we even go beneath the basis in order to solve those questions which really lie at the basis of mankind's vital conditions. A process which does not allow for abstractions. To use a sentence by Goethe: “It is a phenomenological way of action, working on phenomena according to the precise needs of the moment, and it will not be directed by anything other than love for the thing." I think that we can begin the discussion. It would really be wonderful to also hear criticisms or completely different philosophies so as to initially measure the coherency and objectiveness of the thing. It would be interesting to see whether a specialist in the field of agriculture wants to take part, or perhaps a youngster who would like to offer an alternative contribution.

Vitantonio Russo, economist and art professional: “| have followed what Joseph Beuys has said and visualized with considerable inter est. For me, and | also think for many of the people present, it appears clear that Beuys has not wanted to speak as a theoretician of sociology or of political economy but has talked to us as a sincere admirer of Thomas More, once again discovering and implicitly proposing the concept of ‘utopia’ as a positive value—that is, as the ‘theoretical’ objective of a real path which can be entirely run by people today. It is Impossible not to share the ideal tension which is at the basis of the denouncement, the preoccupations and Beuys's indications. And given the fact—and not by chance—that this meeting is taking place in a particular economic structure, | find it licit that on the occasion of the creation here in Pescara of a Foundation for the ‘Rebirth of Agriculture, of Italian agriculture, that as an economist | should mention some of the problems which hinder the implementing of projects which have nothing utopian about them but which are, unfortunately, ineluctably destined to become utopian—utopian in the negative sense of ‘unrealizable, due precisely to the strong and often egoistically obtuse interests displayed by the parties concerned. You all know that a European Economic Community has existed since 1957: this was the outcome of the desire by six countries, increasing to nine in 1973 and soon to become a total of twelve. Well, these countries came together to permit the free circulation of goods, capital and work within an area made up of the sum total of these same

national territories. One readily intuits that it has not been possible to achieve all of this with the wave of a magic wand. Rather, long, patient and complex negotiations have been necessary in order to compose an equilibrium out of a very large number of elements which are by no means homogeneous. lt may seem strange but it is precisely 74

at the negotiating table that, together with the emergence of incomprehensions and positions of intransigence, one also has the most atrocious ‘tricks’ and acts of arrogance. For example, a lot of people don't know that the profound crisis in which one today discusses Italian agriculture was ‘born’ at the negotiating table. In brief, the following is what took place. 80-85% of the Community's budget is earmarked for agricultural expenses. Two years ago, in 1976, this sum was 9 thousand billion ECU (European Currency Unit). And here I'Il pick up Beuys's discussion about the concept of money because the ECU is a super-currency invented to facilitate exchanges between the countries forming part of the EEC which already have a national currency of their own. In 1971 the ECU was worth 1600 Italian lira. Today (1976), as the result of inflation, it is worth 1096. | said that 80-85% of the Community's agricultural budget is absorbed by agricultural spending, in turn divided up between spending in order to guarantee the prices of agricultural products and spending for the restructuring of agricultural plant. Well, something you ought to know is that 44% of the money spent for the entire guarantee sector is earmarked in favour of milk production whereas the so-called Mediterranean products—ours, that is: wine, oil, tobacco and fruit—have absorbed less than the sum set aside by the EEC (in the form of financing) for skimmed milk used for the feeding of livestock. In short, this means that at the negotiating table Italy has had to undergo both the decisions and pressure of economically stronger countries, such as Germany and France, which have a zootechnical patrimony that is very much larger than the Italian one and which, following the Mansholt Plan, has returned to the quantitative values it had in 1905. You will certainly have read about the massacre of cattle, especially of brood females in calf carried out by Italian breeders so as to collect the slaughter reward established by ‘Project 80/ laid down by the same Dutchman, Mansholt. Well then, today we are paying the consequences for this madness with an agricultural food deficit of about six thousand billion lira. Besides the impoverishment of our zootechnical patrimony, this deficit makes Italy depend almost exclusively on abroad; it also depends on the devaluation of the Italian lira which, unfortunately, has not been quickly enough realigned with respect to the value of the so-called ‘green' lira which, in accordance with the Bretton Woods agreements of 1944, is linked to the American dollar. Only recently has the ‘green' lira been devalued by 6%, giving us an advantage (for the tax burden) of just 800 billion lira as against the 8 thousand billions already lost and which have wiped out the 3 thousand billions earned by tourism, the 3000 taken as loans and a further 2000. Aggravating things still further are also the so-called total Monetary compensatory sums—that | shall not illustrate here, otherwise the discussion would become too technical and complicated1—vwhose introduction results from facts that are extraneous to the agricultural sector but connected in particular to the present-day world monetary situation and with the overall strength of the German economy. In other words, their introduction in the agricultural sector 75

is progressively determining an increase in the performance dispar ity of exports among the member countries of the EEC possessing strong currencies to the damage of countries like Italy with a weak currency. Why have | wanted to say all of this? Simply to demonstrate that also when a number of ‘brother’ countries come together to face and solve common problems in the best way possible, it is difficult to find perfect solutions and mechanisms that are capable—and especially on the plane of economic interests—of settling the different and often opposing/contrary positions. There will always be the per son (or country) who with greater ability and foxiness, or for political and economic prestige, will cause his own point of view to prevail, obtaining certain results to the damage of others. In fact, Italy is now paying the price of its position as an earthenware vase in the midst of vases made of iron. In order not to steal time away from the discussion, | conclude by saying that as someone professionally involved in the art sector | do agree with Beuys, with his idealistic position. Instead, as a technician who for thirty years has been concerned with economic problems regarding agriculture and who for reasons of both study and work has personally lived through the contradictions of the land reform of the 1950s and 1960s, firstly, and then that of agricultural cooperation (together with the traumatic clash between farm/peasant civilization and technological progress), | remain rather perplexed when faced by this noble attempt to create a foundation: in other words, an Institute capable of occupying a cultural work space within a sector of the economy that is among the most complex of them all and still with a large number of problems to solve. The organs which work in agriculture in the fields of information and scientific research are innumerable. What are lacking, instead, are organs freed from political or corporate interests which act as a filter for every type of political and socio-economic problem: a sort of ‘free zone' which, given the interdependence existing between the various sectors of the economic system, acts as catalyst of the tensions and various forms of ferment to be found in other production areas, transforming every type of information into cultural information which is not abstract, as an end in itself. Something substantiated, instead, by concrete proposals, by alternative solutions in which good sense, competence and creativity entirely carry out their active role” Joseph Beuys: / cordially thank this gentleman because it is precisely people like himself who come from the practical field, who ought to work in the places we propose to create. These declarations—or rather opinions—by two different artists, are

in any case linked to the awareness of the times we are living in (we cannot overlook the fact that it was 1978), and by the clear coincidence with the present time (these themes will be further developed in the Third Station). For the artist, present-day problems, which are connected to each other, possess a meaning and a special value and, in light of this

76

knowledge, the bare fact of contemporaneousness takes on a great meaning before one's own eyes. If we read the words of the artist/ economist Vitantonio Russo, those of a man who often collaborated with the German Master in discussions of a socio-economic and cul-

tural nature, we can see that his world is permeated with the idea of contemporaneousness. He feels the need for major innovations, for a balanced economy without flaws in techniques and methods, he focuses on the fascination with simultaneousness of the man who has different, independent and irreconcilable differences at the same time, which other men experience in different parts of the world, not at all isolated the one from the other. This “universalism” that modern techne has revealed to man is perhaps the true source of a new conception of time and techne that Art describes today. Russo's reading is a pragmatic one, a profoundly sociological one of man the economist and man the artist, of the time when social relations have almost vanished, when each act and each thought are, alas, Just stimuli limited to personal profit, a sort of continuity that must be interrupted to reactivate a profound rereading of the values of Man and Nature.

The inflation of the mind

Thinkers, even the most rational and conscious of all, have not always been able to develop their theories starting from the actual premises of their thinking. Even Freud did not arrive at the clear awareness of his psychoanalytical research until a relatively late stage in its evolution. This type of experience was at the origin of many significant expressions, both intellectual and artistic. Freud himself called it “civilization and its discontents.' It was the expression of the sense of extraneousness and loss present in romanticism and aestheticism, the same moral anguish, the same uncertainty over the meaning of Culture, the same feeling of being surrounded by unknown, insur mountable, indefinable dangers. Freud explained this “discontent” as it relates to precarious balance, to the impairment of an instinctive life with erotic drives—overlooking the part that could even have lacked economic safety—to the individual's social affirmation, and political participation in a democratic sense. In time, Freud's theories, the formulations that Freud placed in the economic eros, have not earned the psychological value they deserve, vwhereas today social and political lite does depend upon economic eros. Suffice it to recall two great figures of post-Second World War Art, Joseph Beuys and Marcel Duchamp. These men are the lead actors in a specific historical period, men who left their mark by producing important concepts. Beuys attempted to join together man spiritual eros with the empirical reality of Time by recalling throughout his life as an artist the essential concepts of Nature and Man, while Duchamp highlighted the drama of our current times. We could even say that we are experiencing a Duchampian time now, where the prod77

uct that derives from it—the object—has led man to a levelling from high to low, where imaginary perspectives form a unitary consciousness addressed to wiping out all those psychological positions of cosmic love inherent to Beuysian philosophy. In contemporary society, a failed mental optimism turned in the direction of economic eros, stripped of any critical meaning, a true and proper inflating of the mind, characterizes men of every social standing. Men who believe that social conflicts are not so important. By heading in this direction, a frustration, an illusion, a sort of industrialization of corruption has accrued, which has submitted the psyche to a very stressful pace, moods of anxiety, to violent, conflictual and compromising stimuli:

an homogeneous world where art, too, takes part in speculative and contradictory manifestations. Inthe same way it is true that the female body has transformed eroticism into a sort of hygienism; sex in contemporary society has become as mundane as eating, smoking, doing exercise. But if eroticism is no longer just a spontaneous phenomenon, but rather a hygienic norm, the result is the loss of a fundamental dimension: the discovery of the female body is paradoxically once again ghettoized. Eros remains bourgeois to the extent that it remains selfish interest. But nowadays we must transform this individualist Eros into a Social Eros. (Joseph Beuys)

Eros in Art does not have a specific direction, nor does it have a time, not to mention an economic goal. Eros in Art is free, regardless of the temporal experience, it experiences a succession where space sheds its practical nature. Its passiveness rises up from the universal soul of the world, it is a fluid eros, a limitless, open one, which merges with the artist's pure creation, and by taking on all the features of historical time, places itself at the forefront to obey only an intimate development of energy capable of fusing materiality with transcendence, that is, a true re-ligio suited to continuous growth. If we ask this question: what can we do to free ourselves from this mental inflation? What can we teach if our sensitivity is always bottled up in the profit of ephemeral eros?

In my experience, before encountering art | was bound to old certainties, | realized that everything | owned was not enough, | felt insecure, restless, | kept telling myself that | wanted to grow, but | didn't know how and where | should turn my mind. So | began to remove the usual mental patterns imposed by the social, political, economic and peda-

gogical system that | had learnt at School as well as from my Catholic family. | became aware of the ambiguities, the contradictions present

in the habit-bound ways that were so hard to eradicate. | wanted to change my life-system, to free my mind. | began to engage in a conversation with myself, make myself open to eradicating the convic-

tions that kept me from growing. That's how | came into contact with Art, which completely changed my existence: it turned into my faithful 78

friend. | wasn't afraid to take the first step, | was brave, | learned from Art, from wise men like Harald Szeemann and from all the Artists that I met to become free and self-confident. | listened to them and | understood how the wealth of their artistic exploration would lead me towards a world where pleasure was aimed at the deepest aspects of being. | read the book What You Think of Me Is None of My Business by the preacher Terry Cole-Whittaker. Today, fifty years later, | can safely say that it's true: “VVhat you think of me has nothing to do with me” Eros in Art had eradicated in me the chronic patterns of the day-today, such as conflict, narcissism, self-criticism, guilt, anger, and eventually | also stopped thinking about piling up money. There are other kinds of love. | remember when | fell in love for the first time... | was fifteen, my heart beat wildly with joy! It was a wonderful feeling, a pure, limpid one, and it was the same way | felt when | first met true Art about thirty years ago, with just one difference: in this case love will never die. This love of Art is not just something that belongs to me, it contains the fruitful good of all of humanity: This eros lives on to heal wounds. If we try to think of the mind as a garden, initially it's in disarray, filled with soil, brambles, rocks, old trees, in the same way that we are filled with corruption, conformism, greed. Once everything has been removed, it is cleansed and, once the soil has been fertilized, we can plant the seeds that water will help grow. At first it doesn't seem as though important changes are actually taking place, but what's important is to continue tending to the Garden. This also happens when you meet a true artist, one who is capable of nourishing life, of nurturing our thoughts. Each true artist leads to faith because each example of research contains a breath of spirituality. If the resistance that goes in a certain direction can't be overcome, then invention, the artist's expressive will and creativity must be aimed at a goal that is accessible, without realizing that a replacement is being made.

Ecology and the environment

following pages Joseph Beuys, Dusseldorf 1973

The crisis does not affect creativity; passions will emerge whatever the socio-economic situation may be. | might go so far as to say that it is in times of greatest difficulty in existence that the vibrations are the most intense and the cultural tensions the most dynamic. Probably the ideological confusion in which we live today obfuscates spiritual creativity, while the concrete aspect aimed at earning Money is much more evident. In truth, from design to advertising, from fashion to architecture and cooking, everything is addressed to making a large profit. We can safely say that the world of Art still holds all the requirements of inductive creativity; the problem is innovating to enhance productivity. Clearly, the cultural tensions of this era also spring from social problems such as immigration and environmental pollution. I would like to dwell on the issues of ecology and the environment 79

because | feel that they deserve particular reflection. The new vision of reality is strictly ecological, in the sense that it goes beyond the immediate concerns of a mere safeguarding of the environment. In order to reveal the deepest meaning of Ecology, since the 1950s philosophers and scientists have begun to distinguish the so-called “deep ecology” from “superficial environmentalism." VVhile the latter takes an interest in a natural benefit in man's favour, deep ecology is rooted in tensions that go beyond reality itself: this is a concept that touches the human spirit and the individual whose awareness of it grows, so that he feels tied to the cosmos while becoming conscious of his union with Mother Nature. We might also say that the great spiritual traditions already contain the deepest expressions of ecological wisdom. Hence, deep ecology is not something that is truly new, because even the Taoists dealt with it, as it is a philosophy aimed at vital flows and natural changes, which had already been taught by Heraclitus in Ancient Greece; even some of Saint Francis's ethical ideas were profoundly ecological, and at that time they were a revolutionary challenge to Hebrew and Christian ideas that referred to Man and Nature. The wisdom of deep ecology can also be found in the works of Baruch Spinoza and Martin Heidegger, and all the way up to Joseph Beuys and his very last operation called Defence of Nature as the superseding of environmental ecology, having founded the German Green Party Die Grunen in the early 1970s, from which he withdrew when it became a Party, to instead start up an anthropological reading in an operative sense for the Safeguarding of Nature, the Defence of creativity and human values. The writings of American poets Walt Whitman and Gary Snyder are in harmony with this, as are many other masterpieces of world literature carefully structured according to the ecological principles observed in Nature. Ultimately, deep ecology is not a new Movement, it limits itself to recalling the basic principles of a cultural heritage that has always belonged to us. It is likely that what's new about it is the broader vision that many have acquired and to which those Groups that have dissociated themselves from a consumerist Economy and thus a certain lifestyle adhere to. After the Industrial Revolution and progress in technology, Urban Studles became a way of studying the whole physical environment; thus, it particularly includes Architecture and also flanks other human sciences, such as Sociology, Economics, Psychology and Anthropology. Today, we cannot continue to plan without the help of these sciences. An interdisciplinary approach is the basic condition for the correct planning of the future. Unfortunately, a truly joint effort between architects, engineers and experts in other disciplines still does not exist. VVith the development of our urban, industrial and technological life, with the strengthening of commercial ties and the affirmation of competition, and most of all with the exasperated profit-making drive, the conception of spiritual life has all but vanished. Scientific disciplines today, from mathematics to modern physics, can, in my opinion, do without the so-called common sense. In mod82

ern art, too, we have significant examples of how to deal with and overcome the ideas founded on perceptive patterns. Cubism and Sur realism were explicitly this way, then in the 1950s the German artist Joseph Beuys broke with tradition and shifted Art towards transcendence for the Safeguarding of Nature and the Anthropological defence of Man. In literature, as well, considerable changes have taken place, two examples of which concern the work of Rimbaud and Joyce, who were very bold destroyers and creators of language. Ernst Mach, in his essay “Aspiration to Order” justified the Dada Revolution in painting, and Normal Mailer, in the clearly analytical prose of his essay “The White Negro” offered us a theoretical analysis of the language of depression that allows us to even understand Joyce's adventure. It is clear that what lies at the heart of the creative process is the capacity to break with mental patterns. To this regard, we ought to recall Bergson's words: “Life is a stone launched upwards, against the avalanche falling into the valley” My paraphrase is this: artistic creation is a stone thrown against the avalanche of social customs that makes them fall into the valley. But it is also true that if we didn't have habits we wouldn't exist, just as we couldn't exist without creativity. Habit and creativity, that is, law and freedom, that is, gravity and turbulence, lead to a changed, incessant, fruitful dialectic needed for a healthy raising of consciousness. For the cultural operator, as is my case, exploring the depths of an artist's creativity is a complex task. You have to live in symbiosis with the artist, to achieve a correct knowledge of his research, the actual potential of his Knowledge and capacity to convey inner, psychological perceptions in the objective/productive field of symbolic creativity. What often takes place before the conceptual work of a contemporary artist, is that the beneficiary perceives a psychological imbalance, while in truth the creative person is capable of finding aspects that are intellectually less structured in his own mental functioning. The truly creative person always possesses his own vision, even if at first in an intuitive and obscure way. The artist is willing to place trust in vague perceptions, sensations and new actions, exactly those things that many of us set aside because by nature we refuse to be appeased by the schemes or perceptive recurrences that are more easily defined, even those which seem more obvious to us, such as the differentiation between what is inside and what is outside ourselves. The artist who observes Nature, studies its laws and respects them, also feels the need to be at the service of society; he studies its issues also comparing them with the events that took place in the past. Many are the artists who possess an ethical vision of the environment, and are thus capable of representing the outside world symbolically, of having and communicating new ideas. Through the various archetypical languages and also thanks to new languages, these artists perceive social situations before their time, and thus offer to us the messages that arise from the development of mental operations. As they have an active knowledge of reality they are also aware 83

of a total spirituality that through their own intellectual and practical

experiences they know how to implement in their works for the good of Society. These can be enjoyed aesthetically, and generally they are, because even involuntarily the psyche, by pulsating with cultural tensions all around, amalgamates ethics with aesthetics in a sort of vearned-for equilibrium. Contemporary society, with its consumption of goods, has produced a new conception of the human psyche which is manifested in the many facets of daily life through false pleasures and erotic approaches that are often emphatic, and that severely limit that rich intellectual exchange that over the centuries has engendered memorable creative tensions, besides an important criss-crossing of ideas and concepts. Today there is a Literature where uncertainty and ambiguity often transcend the wishes of the authors themselves. In this regard | would like to recall the 6th-century Jainist apology that tells the story of the six blind men who each described an elephant depending on the part of the body they could touch and therefore identify. Touching an ear one said that it was a fan, touching a leg another said it was a column, and so on. The descriptions were all contradictory, but became real as soon as they stopped being considered separately from one another: only reality becomes a totality capable of significantly making differ ences merge, thereby deleting every sort of contradiction. The conformism of group opinions that the media continually force upon us with their inductively hammering are actually the manipulations of the human psyche; in truth, they are formed and are constituted by hegemonic function at a certain level, class, political group in power, capable of dissimulating the real problems of society, and are founded on the fragility of the mind influenced by the spasmodic thirst to possess. Even our nostalgia for the past has become sterile because the human soul has become atrophized in its longing for what is constantly new, thus endlessly producing “tensions/' forgetting the spiritual productivity that leads to an improvement in the workings of the social world: a new psyche that | would dare call chaotic psyche, where everything is legal and possible, where every man is convinced of having an inner order that must be exhibited, a libertinage that is not freedom but decadentism, a mental disarmament that forgets harmony with the world, where there is actually more order than might at first seem to be the case, as long as we search for it in the universality of the Spirit of Nature. A Nature that is the creation and order of the world. ‘The nature of things is nothing other than that they come into being at certain times and in certain ways. Wherever the same circumStances are present, the same phenomena, and no others, arise” (Giambattista Vico) The tensions that Nature exercises in the artist's soul are unique and often they are also a silent suffering. The tensions encountered in many artistic “Operations” can all be situated within an Advanced Research of the analytical sort, often operatively structured in a kind of combinatorial activity that places the operator-polis relationship at the centre. The specific knowledge of economic phenomena leads the artist to manifest an aspect of vital importance: the dynamic equi84

librium of an Economy that is subjected to continuous changes that depend on changing ecological and social Systems. In order to understand the dynamic nature of equilibrium, we need a conceptual system that is also capable of changing and constantly adapting to new scenarios. The evolution of a Society, which is also the evolution of the economic system, is closely connected to the changes in those values that govern the life of a society and determine its vision of the world. Indeed evolution or social depravation depend on the collective system of values already expressed and codified and on choices in terms of innovations and social adaptations. Moreover, it is from changes in the System of values that challenges, great cultural tensions and therefore new Models of behaviour are born. In fact, it is precisely through the System of values that the true artist places at the centre of his work the marriage between economic science and social science: there can be no dichotomy between the two sciences because both are founded on an implicit assumption of precise choices within new models of economic behaviour. Models capable of breaking the invisible casing that locks us up again in a climate of constant expectation and alarm capable of making codes of interpretation break down and leaving a greater and more positive psychological tension for us to reflect upon. Considering the Past in value terms—in the sense of a potential dialectic pathway—allows the artist to observe reality as though it were a.series of /rreversible events connected to motivations and rules proper to the social context in which the so-called cultural localisms as opposed to economic globalism are manifested. Ultimately, a careful examination of artistic research that is at once interpretative and orientational cannot do without the choices made by the artist within contemporary culture or the behaviour that can be introduced into a proposal that can even lead to the superseding of art-making itself, transformed into a pure communicative relationship, where the dialectic instrument is used to offset the distorsions present in the different communication channels within the economic system (this topic is discussed at length in the Third Station).

Introspections Each social revolution is preceded, or brings with it, a change in the perception of the world or in the perception of the “ possible," or both. It is inevitable that these different perceptions at the beginning were considered to be absurd by the thinking of the time. And yet we can safely say that these changes in perspective, which are often completely overlooked today, led to changing the aspect and the nature of the world to the extent that thereafter it is precisely common sense that appears to be inadequate. There are many examples from the past: from the Copernican Revolution to the belief that slaves were people with rights and not “savages” to be bought and sold, a reality that did not just go against the Bible but was also economically 85

revolutionary. And yet the cosmological theories that had already been formulated for some time were not what brought change to the world; this change was brought by the test of their validity. If we consider the idea that in the Culture of the past one hundred vears many things have changed in institutions, technology, comforts, and if we compare all this with cultural progress, at least in Groups that are of a higher status, a huge disproportion becomes evident. But in our everyday existence, we instead observe a regression in the Culture of the individual in terms of ideals and spirituality. It makes no sense to say that the current scientific revolution of humanity is favourable to man. There is a rather close relationship between evolution as given and the moral question. To be able to venture down the real road of development it is necessary to make a choice, i.e. to choose which road to take. Among the most important world issues, those which will decide whether today's youths will have a future must also take into account the hostilities that divide cultures, ideologies, religions, nations. No one knows whether hatred between Arabs and Israelis will cause a new catastrophe to explode, if the age-old antagonism between Northern Ireland's Protestants and Catholics will become an unstoppable explosion, or if the situation in Afghanistan and terrorism will continue to be a serious threat and of what proportion. The inequality in terms of well-being between the “haves” and “have nots"” lays the foundations for hatred now and in the future (see the Conferenza Permanente di Beuys nei 100 giorni di Documenta VI [Beuys's Permanent Conference in the 100 Days of Documenta VI]). It seems as though there is no end to the antagonism between cul tures, races and religions. The world is getting smaller, technology is developing more and more, and this makes antagonism a question of life or death for each citizen in the world. We are all aware of the intercultural and interracial tension that exists, but if everyone were to become conscious of the fact that the current lines of behaviour point directly towards our destruction, we could, at an international level, seek possible solutions. I am convinced that only an approach that focuses around the Person can offer the right alternative. The main reason why man today experiences inner conflict must be searched for in all the frictions and tensions that are proclaimed. A person does not just harbour conflicts that are manifested in many moments in life; there is also a natural tendency designated as being an actualizing tendency, which can be observed in all living organisms: this is the foundation on which the approach that focuses on the person is built. This “tendency” can be obstructed, but it cannot be completely eliminated, unless the organism itself is destroyed. To this regard | like to take as an example an experience | had as a teenager when | lived in the countryside and the supply of potatoes for the winter was kept in a container under a small window, in the basement. Although the conditions weren't favourable, plants would sprout from the potatoes: pale shoots, so different from the lush, green ones that sprout when potatoes are planted in the ground in spring. These 86

slender shoots stretched and grew until they finally reached the distant light from the window, a sort of “desperate expression” of that directional tendency that | described, an example of how life never gives up. This potential, as previously mentioned, belongs to all men, but even more so to artists. If, then, we go on to speak about moral evaluation, conscience, the way of conceiving life and the things that surround us, we must acknowledge the idea that the perceptive experience of the artist is psychological experience, metaphor, the human expression of a material universe, which is transmuted into knowledge, transcendence and spirituality: just as man judges things ethically, so he also judges the human act of artistic creativity. As regards the problem of good and evil, we must distinguish between morality and conscience. Morality differs from Society to Society. For example, in some Eastern Countries blood vendettas are legitimate and moral, while it is immoral to refuse to kill someone who killed your relative. In Europe, killing is always and in any case a crime that is punished by law. Conscience corresponds to the emotional understanding of truth, which can differ from one country to another, and from one person to another. The artist's research contains both morality and conscience, because its central goal is knowledge within which psychological evaluation is an integral part. VVhen one decides to attempt to define the “ideal human behaviour” one almost immediately arrives at problems of moral evaluation. The psychology of the human personality is always assailed by the ethical nature of the perceptive phenomena and assumes them as its own field of study. This is clearly stated in the expression “to measure someone up” This is an evaluation that underlies the approach of a normative type, which is comparable to the suit that, regardless of whether or not it was made ready-to-wear or tailormade, is vvorn with the same pleasure and for the same purposes; the lesser economic value of the standardized suit is undeniable. The evaluation of others and even ourselves is a practice that is constantly carried out, whatever the actual value of the suit worn. In comparing one observation with another a profound self-assessment is always necessary. Psychological perceptions help us to understand our inner selves. So we may wonder: why doesn't man possess self-awareness despite the fact that he has everything he needs to be able to do so? The reason for this first of all lies in an understanding of one's own situation, in the total absence of a desire for self-improvement and in an insufficient amount of strong-willed

energy that is strong enough to help a person emerge from the tor

Joseph Beuys in his

por of a life of habit: the slovwer the perceptive vibrations, the more spiritual values tend to become annulled. On the contrary, the Artist aims in an upwards direction, in a sort of sublimation that day after day reinforces his creative energies. His inner Alchemy leads him to

studio in Dusseldorf signing the multiple of Pala, 1983

transform negative emotions into positive ones, he uses material created by past recollections, from self-analysis, from the world about

following pages

87

ti)

Ri

ata

him. His mind is like a sort of chemical factory that gets raw materials from the outside and transforms them into esoteric substances. This complexity of intimate and profound perceptions feeds the work of art by providing it with that Form of the Soul that Aristotle calls the Form of the Body. While any individual's psychology tends to set aside every type of perception, so that it is like a closed, armourplated, inaccessible door, the creative person instead possesses a personal health to be under stood in the sense of integrity, stability and coherence, all of which are socially manifested. This accentuation is based on equilibrium, a fundamental fact that must be read as the harmony of life, ethical value, psychological stimulus capable of catalyzing the attention on the nobility of Art, a sort of Art that improves life.

The fisheye of the mind Each image of the mind is immersed in the current that flows all around it. It is accompanied by the meaning of the relationships that exist, both near and far, the dying echo of the origins and the nascent meaning of its direction. The meaning and value of the image that the mind attempts to reproduce is immersed in a fluctuating and flexible half-darkness. Our mind processes and combines thoughts, doubts, imagination, concepts: a sort of competitive and diversified exercise where inner activity plays with a ritualization that is culturally idealized by an introspective struggle and by the conscious and responsible control of subjective insight. There exists a mental self-management that always stretches between /ogic—which can only provide certainty, proof and rules—and insight as the instrument of invention that has the capacity to grasp the different concepts in the most intimate part of the Self in a moment's time, rather than in the possibility of constructing an image or a hypothesis. Our minds are predisposed for originality. Numerous psychologists have carried out in-depth research that has focused attention on the single original action rather than on the author's per sonality. This is understandable, given that the birth and development of the original idea are normally more immediate, more vivid in the history of the person who conceived the idea. Only by associating particular insights and circumstances has the creative process of genius had the intellective capacity to organize a system of answers characterized by deep contents, which transformed their exploration into a historical event. A good reason to believe that originality is congenial to those who have original ideas and insights and that know how to transform them into actions, facts, special works. Other individuals instead don't know how to separate themselves from a stereotyped and conventional way of thinking: it is always what the mind produces that provides an answer concerning the origin of genius. VVe can compare the mindto a sports complex where the athlete who

goes onto the field, out into the open, makes use of his own athletic demands and also of his specific skills. The true athlete exploits means

90

Joseph Beuys atVilla Durini with his symbolic rosmary and laurel

sprigs, San Silvestro Colli 1973

91

that are suited to his particular needs, he knows how to use personal experience and that of the champions who came before him, harmonizing the passion for sports, even when this means exhausting training sessions, with behaviour in daily life and within one's own team, always open to useful suggestions. VVhen the athlete exploits these certainties he is a true champion, because it moves him away from the short:lived, from quick and easy profit, and both victory and defeat are a test of the choices made according to ethics and moral coherence. If the artist is a special person, then he is also a man who, like the sports champion, has the courage to risk, to go onto the field every single day, to train and also to experience the bitterness of a System, where unfairness, apathy, compromise and conflict will not deter him from issuing a critical judgement, a correct and necessary evaluation addressed to people and events. The artist possesses his own vocabulary, he writes his story while respecting Nature's essential laws, which are valid for the Men of every race and religion. My personal experience allovvs me to declare that the true artist is a champion in his field; he plays with his own life in which art offers him the chance to exist and leave behind a tangible sign of his creativity and spirituality. | will return to the need for psychological equilibrium in the person who is usually described as being mentally sane. VWVhen we think of such a person it means conceiving of him as simple and balanced, capable of living in relative peace with himself and with others, of raising children in a healthy way, of giving his own valid contribution to the development of society. In other words, we see him as a serene person, vho knows how to put up with his own suffering and is capable of alleviating that of others. The enchantment of artistic life is a constant reawakening that is based on pauses, silences, vibrations, tension in which, like in a Gaussian curve, a hill can be followed by a sorrowful decline. But then there is always the artist who “creates dreams (oneiros) for those who are awake. (Plato) The amount of Time required for Art is long, continuous, and we can compare it to the time it takes for a plant to grow: a seed needs to be placed in fertile soil and it has to be looked after constantly. For it to be able to bear fruit, we have to cater to its needs. This is how we cultivate art; it is a long and careful cultivation, the only one capable of enriching Society. True Art is never cultural fashion, it is the acoustics of the soul that indicates the means by which man hones and articulates his multifarious gifts, overpowering the universe by means of knowledge and work, and through communication prospectively making the social life of the new generations more human. The first function of the Work of Art is indeed that of communication. But how does the work of art communicate?

There are two precise moments in figurative art that interact symbiotically and that capture the mind of men: the aesthetic and the transcendent. It is a fleeting moment, and so short that it is almost 92

always timeless, in which the spectator is in harmony with the language of art, looking and listening and thus becoming a part of it. He ceases being his own ordinary Self, and the painting, the construc-

tion, the statue, the voice or whichever other reality he is involved in is no longer outside of him. The two become a single identity; time and space are erased, and the spectator is overwhelmed by a single awareness. VVhen he once gains consciousness, it's as if he had been Initiated into enlightening and formative mysteries. This norm exists inside each one of us, the artist does no more than activate this inner greatness, because inertia, the stereotype, the deficient sense of responsibility, the scarce and perverse conduct on the stage of everyday life have disoriented and inflated the quality of art and life, man has become like a sleepwalker, the artist has the task of reawakening the meaning of life. Communicating art means transmitting the essential principles of nature, the world and man; it means remembering love between differ-

ent human beings, the methods to be followed to gain knowledge. It means communicating on the way life is meant to be lived.

In my work, objects and drawings

are elements ofsecondary importance. The time we are livingin is not suited to man and the goal ofmy work is indeed the release ofman

from this slavery (Joseph Beuys)

following pages

Difesa della Natura,

Manifesto Maria 1984

These thoughts areÈ the continuing notes of my entire existence, È

so that nothing will be lost.

I Se Se en

Creativity is a matter ofthe possibility ofthought, or of what we might call the power ofthought; and it is also

a question ofthe creativity offeelings (Joseph Beuys)

Third Station

The Voice

Beuys. Life and Works Joseph

Beuys was

born on May 21, 1921

at Krefeld, the son of

Hubert Beuys and his wife Johanna (née Huttermann), who lived at Kleve. The Beuys were descended from a family of millers and flour merchants in the Geldern area, and Beuys's own father had opened a flour and forage business in an old dairy farm at Rindern, near Kleve. It is important to focus upon this geographical information, given that this fascinating part of Germany would have a powerful impact upon the development of the sensibilities and imagination of the young boy. The following is a quote from Caroline Tisdall: “There can be few places in Northern Europe stranger than Cleves and the country that surrounds it. Outsiders call it the ‘terror landscape/ referring partly to the superstition of its inhabitants and partly to the atmosphere that prevails over dune and marsh as the Rhine and Maas flow towards the sea. This is a Celtic and Catholic enclave in a Germanic and Protestant country, a place where the border counts for little in the minds of the people; by name and culture many are Dutch, just as the land has been at times in the past. The history of Europe has been played out over this land, by Romans, Batavians, Franks, Germans, Frenchmen and Spaniards. In more recent times, generations of aristocrats, revolutionaries and warriors have left tangible traces on the landscape, and echoes of these can be perceived more or less directly in Beuys's later work. Classical monuments and formal gardens linger on as reminders of Moritz von Nassau of the House of Orange, whose 17th-century vision of an ideal spiritual town plan was partly realized in Cleves. At nearby Rindern stands the house of Anacharsis Cloots, ardent thinker of the French Revolution, whose belief that such revolution had to spread beyond France cost him his head at the guillotine. Napoleon fought and won here, leaving in the area a feeling for the heroic spirit of Mars which recurs from time to time in Beuys's work, and which he indirectly characterizes as the metal iron. In our own century the battles of the Second World War have left vast cemeteries, anonymous monuments to thousands of senseless deaths. But there are other layers of history more fundamental to this landscape, and certainly more accessible to a child. The flatness of the land bears the marks of its making, bounded as it is to the west by the sudden interruption of the Kaiserwald, the giant ridge of alluvial moraine on which Moritz von Nassau placed an obelisk. To the east comes the great plain of Eurasia, traditionally crossed by nomads or by restless migrants like the hare who are Joseph Beuys at Villa Durini, San Silvestro Colli, Pescara 1973

heedless of modern man's territorial borders. No surprise, then, that Beuys's own biographical hints of childhood experience tell of ‘heathen children/ a ‘stag leader; ‘radiation; ‘the difference be99

tween loamy sand and sandy loam, ‘the grave of Genghis Khan! and ‘heathers with healing herbs. Dominating the town itself was the Schwanenburg, a massive castle topped by a great golden swan. This, seen over the steeped sloping roofs of those parts, was perhaps the most potent image of all: For a child the swan was perhaps the most potent of all images, an intimation of deep layers of history and meaning that elude rational explanation. Later this sense of something intangible was to find expression in drawings, particularly in the series From the intelligence of swans of the 19505. But one should also listen to what Beuys himself has to say on early experiences that were linked with various aspects of the landscape within which he spent his childhood. Beuys: This is in no way a literary interest in swans, or a specific historical tradition. It is part of what you feel if you live in an area like this. It has to do with swanlike things, with the sense of continuum of life and death as experienced by people from here, the Netherlands, right to Brabant and ‘s Hertogenbosch, the lands of Bosch and Bruegel.

His parents gave the boy a strict Catholic upbringing, in a family that had no sympathy with National Socialism. With regard to his relationship with his parents, Beuys would write: My relationship with my parents cannot be characterized as a close one. On the contrary, | had to take care of myself from the time | was quite young. Times were hard and had a tremendously threatening and oppressive effect on me as a child. Certainly, | had a very lasting attachment to the lower Rhine region and to Kleve. There were, among our neighbors, certain men who one could look upon as models. Johannes Sanders, for example, who had a great influence on me, had a big laundry near my parents’ house which was bombed during the war and therefore no longer exists. This laundry was a dark building with huge chimneys. Sanders himself was a progressive spirit who regularly experimented with all sorts of equipment. There was always interesting equipment at his place, such as boilers and heating fixtures, ironing machines and centri fuges with enormous flywheels. As a youngster all this naturally fascinated me; it was fantastic and grotesque at the same time. When titles such as “Stag Leader” or “Ghenghis Khan's Grave” appear, they can be interpreted as fundamentally psychological: early experiences, some of which are dreams, which one really experiences as a child; dreamlike or extraordinarily subjective images which appear later in life as coherently objective. As a child one experiences these things in a fairly pictorial way; at least this was the case with me, in that whatever was conveyed to me by experience, | acted out. | can still emember that for years | behaved like a shepherd: | went around with a staff. a sort of “Eurasian staff” which later appeared in my works, and | always had an Imaginary 100

herd gathered around me. | was really a shepherd who explored everything that happened in the vicinity. | felt very comfortable in this role, in which | sought to immediately invent experiences | had had. | began to take an interest in plants and botany and learned just about everything there was to learn in that field, which | put down in several notebooks. On regular excursions with other children we assembled collections which were made accessible to the public. Naturally, all this still had the character of a game. From old towels, rags, and remnants, which we obtained by begging, we built big tents where we displayed the objects we had collected, from flies, reptiles, tadpoles, fish, beetles, mice, and rats to old mechanical equipment and any sort of technical apparatus, in short everything we had gathered. There was also much digging; we built a maze of trenches with underground rooms. All of this took place in Kleve between 1925 and 1933. In his autobiographical sketch, Beuys makes no reference at all to the period from 1933 to 1940, even if those years corresponded to the period in his life which is usually the one when a youth's character is formed, when his abilities and preferences become more clearly defined. As a student, Beuys excelled in all areas of science—he even set up a complete scientific laboratory at home— as well as being a pianist and cellist. Alongside this talent for the natural sciences, he developed a great interest in the figurative arts—in particular sculpture, which he began to know and love thanks to regular visits to the studio of a local sculptor, Achilles Moortgat. lt was in this studio that the young Beuys would first come into contact (via photographic reproductions) with the artist whom he always regarded as his true master: Wilhelm Lehmbruck, the sculptor.

Beuys: They gave me my first real feeling that something tremendous could be created with form. During this period Beuys also developed an interest in Nordic folklore and mythology—not because they were so eagerly promoted as part of Nazi indoctrination but because they offered the youth a chance to react against the one-sidedness of the humanistic educational system. Over the years from 1933 to 1940 he was exposed to a number of cultural and intellectual influences—from Kierkegaard to Nietzsche and from Wagner to Satie. The clash between Classical and Romantic literature would have a special impact on his education, with influences including not only Schiller and Goethe, Holderlin and Novalis, Jean Paul and Thieck, but also the inventive visual language of Edvard Munch and the literary work of Hamsun and other Scandinavian authors (whose writings he devoured in this period). Beuys was a detached spectator of the political scene during the years of Nazism, becoming an active participant on only one occasion: when the Nazi authorities ordered the burning of his school's 101

library, he leapt amidst the flames to save the COpy of Linnaeus's Systema Naturae, the famous botanist's work ultimately becoming a lifelong companion. Beuys: One investigates and examines much at this age, most of which consists of specific stimuli. Beuys took his final exams Kleve. In spite of his clear of his undeniable talent for ical course, with a view to

at the Hindenberg Secondary School in interest in the arts, he would—because the sciences—decide to take a pre-medbecoming a pediatrician.

Beuys: /t was difficult for me to commit myself in any way; besides, the goal of becoming a pediatrician was never anything concrete. This idea was only a manifestation of my strong interest in science and technology, as was my decision to join the Air Force. But at the age of 19 in 1940, when he was attending courses of pediatric medicine, he was called up for military service. His training, initially as a radio operator, took place at Poznan and Erfurt. In 1941 he was transferred to Koniggratz for training as a divebomber pilot, the following year being sent to serve in Ukraine and Crimea, where he was stationed at Sebastopol. In 1943 his best friend, Fitz Rolf Rothenburg, died in a concentration camp—and that same year the JU-87 that Beuys was flying was shot down by Russian anti-aircraft fire and crashed in the middle of a snow storm. The unconscious pilot was found amidst the wrecked fuselage of his Stuka by a group ofTatars, who cared for him until, rediscovered by a German army group, he was transferred back to a Beuys: Had it not been for the Tatars | would not be alive today. They were the nomads of the Crimea, in what was then no man's land between the Russian and German fronts, and favoured neither side. | had already struck up a good relationship with them, and often wandered off to sit with them. “Du nix njemcky” they would say, “du Tatar” and try to persuade me to join their clan. Their nomadic ways attracted me, of course, although by that time their movements had been restricted. Yet it was they who discovered me in the snow after the crash, when the German search parties had given up. | was still unconscious then and only came round completely after twelve days or so, and by then | was back in a German field hospital. So the memories | have of that time are images that penetrated my consciousness. The last thing | remember was that it was too late to Jump, too late for the parachutes to open. That must have been a couple of seconds before hitting the ground. Luckily | was not strapped in—-l always preferred free movement to safety belts. | had been disciplined for that, just as | had been for not carrying a map of Russia—somehow I felt that | knew the area better than any map. My friend was strapped in and he was atomized by the impact—there was almost nothing to be found of him 102

afterwards. But | must have shot through the windscreen as it flew back at the same speed as the plane hit the ground and that saved me, though | had bad skull and jaw incurie. Then the tail flipped over and | was completely buried in the snow. That's how the Tatarsfound me days later. | remember voices saying “Voda” (Water), then the felt of their tents, and the dense pungent smell of cheese, fat and milk. They covered my body in fat to help it regenerate warmth, and wrapped it in felt as an insulator to keep the warmth in.

Declared fit for service in 1944, he was sent to the front in Northern Holland and the Baltic coast of the North Sea, serving with the “Erdmann Phantom Division,” a rag-tag body of paratroopers lumped together with little training or proper equipment. Once again Beuys was seriously wounded—for the fifth time since the beginning of the war; in fact, he would receive the Gold Medal for Wounded Servicemen. In 1945 he was taken prisoner by the English, spendIng nine months in a prison camp at Cuxhaven. The following year he could return home, where he found that Kleve had been heavily bombed and its Schwanenburg Tower had lost the golden swan that used to surmount it. At this point he decided to dedicate himself entirely to artistic pur suits—in part because of the sad experiences of the war but also because the limits of traditional specialized science had become clear to him as the result of one particular experience during a lesson he attended at Poznan University in 1942 whilst on study leave. This decision was further reinforced by the advice he received from his friend Hans Lamers. Beuys: / experienced it as a vivid shock in the middle of a lecture on amoebae by a professor who had spent his whole life pondering a couple of fuzzy images of single cells somewhere between plant and animal structure. lt gave me such a fright that | said: “No, that's not my idea of science.” l’m still haunted by the image of those little amoebae on that blackboard. Thus in 1946 Joseph Beuys became an active practitioner of art. This change was the result of a precise intention; it was no casual decision. Having recognized the limitations of a science incapable of nurturing man's visionary abilities, he turned to art as the one practice that embraces the whole of lived experience. As in the earliest days of human history, art was envisaged as part of the very process of life; it brought together everything in the generation and liberation of the individual. The change in direction brought Beuys into contact with the various artists in Kleve. He would attend lessons at the studio of Walter Brùx, from whom

he learnt the rudiments of sculpture and also ac-

quired up-to-date information with regard to contemporary art. He was also often in the company of Hans Lamers, who became a personal friend and taught him the very praxis of art. Beuys was thus readily welcomed by the Kleve Union of Artists, at whose shows 103

he would exhibit continuously from 1946 to 1955. This Was also the period when he first met the van der Grinten brothers, with whom he would forge a close and long-lasting friendship. From 1947 to 1951 Beuys was at the Dusseldorf Academy of Fine Arts, where he attended lessons given by Josef Enseling. These were years of training in both technique and theory, with the young man pursuing his own artistic research and pushing his explorations to the very boundaries of the absolute. However, he gradually discovered that rigid specialization was not only to be found in the natural sciences: artistic notions could be just as restrictive, pigeonholing things within concepts such as “life drawing” or “art for art's sake” Thus, in 1949 he enrolled in the university course given by Ewald Matarè, a sculptor known for his mystical faith in the unity of all creation and for his emphasis on manual creation in art. Matarè allowed his students to work with the most mundane of materials, thus nurturing their physical awareness of “stuff” as such. And whilst Beuys rejected the ideology of “the craftsmanship of art,’ he did accept his teacher's emphasis on the unity of creation; it was in this period that he developed his notions with regard to the positive function of art in the construction of useful objects. In 1949-52, the years of his academic training, Beuys produced a large number of watercolours; he made drawings, noted down experiences and experimented. The results could be said to mark out and map human evolution and genesis. These esoteric traces and topologies of the human body pulsate with the transcendental thought of the artist himself. Thence came about the first decisive works in plastic form, after the vast quantity of drawings produced in the years immediately after the war. The recurrent themes were religious, with frequent resort to animal motifs and the human figure. These works reveal a surprising alternation between form that is sometimes conventional and sometimes of independent modernity; the themes may be very traditional but the pregnant symbolism is rendered with the help of very non-traditional materials. The unusual appearance of these works was the fruit of the hypersensitized perceptions of the artist, who drew his inspiration not from a rationally explicable optical reality but from indecipherable physical stimuli and experiences. The subject of Beuys's drawings will be discussed in the Fourth Station. Perhaps the most interesting work of this phase is the Queen Bees series of the early 1950s; the theme of honey bees would recur frequently in Beuys's thoughts on art.

Beuys: These “Queen Bees” all possess something that is very strongly organic. In the middle is a sort of heart point, from which the forms radiate and then encircle again. Actually it is a totally or ganic picture, including things which represent Christianity, heart, love, and resignation. | attempted to portray this as directly organic, as a sort of psychological process. In this light the “Queen Bees” are nothing more than moving crosses. When one takes the cross 104

or the “pietà,” they are more or less recognizable symbols from the history of Christianity and art. The “pietà” is a classical motif from the Middle Ages. Naturally crosses appear everywhere. | also made crosses which deliberately repeat a totally Romanesque tradition. Later | freed myself from this and attempted to understand it in a new way, from the perspective of forces. What | want to say by this is that the “Queen Bees” are in and of themselves moving crosses. Here the cross is organic, moving from right to left as a form that develops asymmetrically. During these years Beuys still pursued his studies; in a period of intense cultural exploration, he read widely, analyzing the work of leading figures in the fields of philosophy, literature and science. One of those who would most influence his thought was Rudolf Steiner, the founder of Anthroposophy—an influence that will emerge frequently during the course of this Third Station. As for literature, Beuys developed a love for the work of James Joyce, feeling such an affinity that, between 1958 and 1961, he would add two “chapters” of his own sketches to Ulysses. Beuys: /t is all too little discussed that what permeates things with life in Joyce's works is actually the Irish mythological element; it is almost always something spiritual. They are written, to be sure, in a very modern style which can be argued as being much too objective, but their true liveliness is totally spiritual and mythological, and in my opinion can be linked to the realistic elements of the Indo-Aryan context. In addition, the process of expansion in Joyces works interests me in a formal sense, in that it is in actuality a spiritual form of movement. In effect, these were the years that saw Beuys engage in a critical re-reading of the events that make up humankind's cultural, artistic,

scientific and social historyr—an endeavour that would remain a key feature of his personality as an artist. Thus one can understand his interest in the figures of Leonardo da Vinci and Galileo Galilei. The former is famous as a figure who was not only an artist and architect but also a student of anatomy, botany, geology, optical perception and mechanics. Beuys was amazed not simply by Leonardo's versatility but also by the fact that his almost encyclopaedic knowledge in such varied fields was so precise, was so solidly based upon observation and experimentation. As for Galileo, he was the founder of mathematical sciences who had clashed with the official bodies of the Church because of their dogmatic faith in Aristotle. Beuys saw these two figures as laying the very foundations for the positivist bourgeois thought which centuries later would produce the Bourgeois Revolution.

Beuys: Leonardo is as an artist the one who characterizes how to arrive at a bourgeois concept of knowledge. It is precisely this concept of knowledge with which the bourgeoisie made their revolu105

tion. It began with Leonardo, who is the artistic representative of this tendency, as Galileo is its scientific representative. Justas Goethe dreamt of establishing a religion of his own, in which theosophy and alchemy would ex-exist, striving to achieve a Synthesis of human beliefs and thus fully redeeming man-god—so too Beuys would champion the ideal of a special religion and morality. Having been brought up a Catholic, he was a staunch opponent of The child of a land in which the roots of both bourgeois Catholicism. ntism went deep, he sought a morality that Protesta and sm Catholici but grew from the Fundamental Prinoutside from was not imposed and develop within humankind. nurtured are that ciples of Nature by Joseph Koch to produce a ioned commiss was In 1953 Beuys cross for the tomb of his parents—a work that would stimulate a number of important studies, reflections and analyses. In this cross Beuys assesses materialism as a positive result of Christianity; it is a memorable moment in which he himself clashes with the dogmas of the Christian faith. For Beuys, the “cross” was a fulerum, a point of intersection between Antiquity and Christianity, between Christianity and material ism—thus a sign of dialogue between two points of view, essential in any discussion that strives for truth. Having completed his studies at the Academy, Beuys in 1954 rented a studio in an old building (since demolished) in the Heerdt district of Dusseldorf. But then came a period of profound crisis and depression, with the artist feeling doubt about everything, including his work. In 1956, the depression—and the substantial expense resulting from the medical treatments he had had to undergo—vwould force Beuys to leave DUsseldorrf. He stayed as a guest with the brothers Joseph and Franz van der Grinten, who—as well as being friends—vwere first collectors of his work; as early as 1951 they had appreciated his art, beginning their collection with two woodcuts produced when Beuys was part of the Kleve Union of Artists. That very year they bought twenty drawings, becoming such close friends of the artist that, when his illness was most debilitating, he found refuge in their home at Kranenburg, set within the pleasant countryside of Westphalia (not far from Beuys's native Kleve). Here, thanks to his work outdoors in the fields and the affection shown by his friends, he gradually recovered physically and spiritually. It is Important to remember this period of depression because this was when Beuys would, after great effort, manage to find the direction that would ultimately bring him into closer contact with himself as an artist, and with the very meaning of human life. The following are extracts from interviews in which he recognizes the key importance of this painful period. Beuys: Certainly incidents from the war produced an aftereffect on me, but something also had to die. | believe this phase was one of the most important for me in that | had to fully reorganize myself 106

constitutionally; | had for too long a time dragged a body around with me. The initial stage was a totally exhausted state, which quickly turned into an orderly phase of renewal. The things inside me had to be totally transplanted; a physical change had to take place in me. Illnesses are almost always spiritual crises in life, in which old experiences and phases of thought are cast off in order to permit positive changes. Certainly many men never experience this phase of reorganization, but when one comes through it, much of what was previously unclear or only vague acquires a totally plausible direction. Such a crisis is a sign that either there has been a loss of direction or that too many directions have been approached. It is a decisive challenge; much has to be settled and one must take new directions toward new experiences. This was the stage at which | began systematic work on certain basic principles. Beuys: The positive aspect of this is the start of a new life. The whole thing is a therapeutic process. For me it was a time when | realized the part the artist can play in indicating the traumas of a time and initiating a healing process. That relates to medicine, or what people call alethemy or shamanism, though that should not be overstressed. For me it meant the continuation of the threads in my biography that had led me to scientific and biological experiments at Rindern. Now through art this was brought to a higher level of application. Out of it came the Theory of Sculpture. By that | mean that | saw the relationship between the chaos | had experienced and a sculptural analogy. Chaos can have a healing character, coupled with the idea of open movement which channels the warmth of chaotic energy into order or form. Objects lite “Crystal” came before the theory, but now | began to see how structures can be created which relate to every kind of life and work. Beuys: /t was a very important crisis because | began to question everything—literally everything, including the point of my own life. During this crisis | decided to invest all my strength and energy in exploring the very depths of life, art and science. Besides, all my previous work had led up to this; but the result had to be a completely different theory of art, science, life, democracy, capital, economics, freedom, culture ... Over three/four years |Managed to

establish the broad outlines of a wider theory of art, that embraced the social body as a whole and was not limited to the traditional issues of culture, of the artist as an isolated figure, of the problems in teaching art, of history of art, the musicians, and all the rest that already exists in our society. Thus | was able not only to sweep away all the problems that had plagued me over the previous years, but also to break with tradition; to find the right level for the revolution—-and evolution—of human development as a whole. From the very beginning this was research into the idea of human work as such—not just the work of so-called artists recognized as special ists within our society, but anthropological reflection upon the very notion of human creativity. 107

Having emerged

purified by the experience of this bleak period,

Beuys turned with renewed energy and determination to tackle the

issues of his existence as a man and as an artist. On September 19, 1959 he married the art history teacher Eva Wirmbauch, the daughter of a well-known zoologist. The marriage would produce two children: Wenzel and Jessyka. In 1961 the couple moved to Dusseldorf, where Beuys was appointed to the Chair of Monumental Sculpture at the Academy of Fine Arts; this prestigious appointment would cause an outcry as his name was still largely unknown within avant-garde circles in Germany. For Beuys, the acceptance of this teaching position meant plunging into the living core of his own work as an artistHthe experience would serve as the basis for his Social Sculpture, his famous Living Sculpture.The issue of his teaching is discussed in the Section Four of the Second Station. The years 1962-65 were also important because they saw Beuys establish links with the Fluxus movement and participate at vari ous events that it organized—including some held at the Academy where Beuys himself taught. An international movement, Fluxus brought together journalists and sculptors, musicians and philosophers, the major figures in the group being George Brecht, Bazon Brock, John Cage, Robert Filliou, Dick Higgins, Alison Knowles, George Maciunas, Charlotte Moorman, Nam June Paik, Thomas Schmit, Daniel Spoerri, Wolf Vostell and

Emmet Williams. However,

there were numerous others who participated from time to time, thus confirming the very open nature of the movement as a whole. The basic concept that inspired Fluxus was the ineluctable link between art and life, with the group exploring artistic possibilities in concerts, happenings and collective events. The fact that, at the beginning of his work, Beuys should participate in this movement was important because it gave him an opportunity to expound his ideas for a wider public. Furthermore, it also brought him into contract with a group of people who were determined to break down the barriers between art and life, who pursued the goal of interdisciplinary communication. George Maciunas, the main organizer of Fluxus events, had this to say in a letter to Thomas Schmit in 1964: “The aims of Fluxus are social (not aesthetic) and are directed to: step by step elimination of the Fine Arts (Music, Theatre, Poetry, Prose, Painting, Sculpture, etc.). This motivates the desire to redirect the use of materials and human ability into socially constructive purposes; in other words the applied arts: industrial design, journalism, architecture, engineering science, graphics and typography, printing, etc., all of which are related to the fine arts and offer fine artists the best alternative working possibilities. So Fluxus is strictly against the art object as functionless and destined only to be sold and provide the artist with an income. At most it can have the pedagogic function of making clear to people how superfluous art is and how superfluous the object itself is ... Secondly Fluxus is against art as a medium for the artist's 108

ego ... and tends therefore towards the spirit of the collective, to anonymity and anti-individualism ... the best Fluxus Composition is one which is most strongly impersonal and ready-made” Vvhile Beuys sympathized with the Fluxus idea that art should not be restricted to artists, in the end he felt that this “opening up” of the praxis of art was not being pursued in a coherent manner; a clear theoretical and political basis was necessary if such action was to be effective. Furthermore, he was decidedly opposed to the Dadaist provocations that were part of Fluxus. In effect, Beuys was never interested in provocation for its own sake; without any innovative conceptual content, all such provocation produced was agitation and shock. As far as he was concerned, provocation should be a release of energy, a shift beyond the rut into which consciousness had fallen; it made it possible to experience anew that which had been unconscious, to focus interest on that which had been a matter of indifference. Hence Beuys's par ticipation in the group was partial and intermittent. This is what he himself had to say on the matter: Beuys: There were in general three main tendencies which flowed together: the first were things which attempted to develop something more from a connection to the history of ideas; this was the

least of the three tendencies. lf someone very directly questions this, | was the only one who attempted to bring it up. The Dada tendency was also there; this was represented mostly by people lite Paik, while a surrealistic tendency was brought by the Scandinavians. The political dimension was very limited; it was actually present only in the original talent of Maciunas ... They held a mirror in front of people, without using it to lead to a betterment of their condition.

What

particularly attracted

Beuys to Fluxus was

with music—even if “music” conventional sense.

its involvement

here is not to be understood

in the

Beuys: The original Fluxus concerts were organized by people whose interest was in sound rather than painting or sculpture. Hence the link with John Cage, La Monte Young, and even Stockhausen and those concerned with electronic music. But their attitude was a revolutionary one and went against the traditional idea of the concert. Works were often presented simultaneously or followed quickly one after another. Often nothing more than a piano, a ladder and a pail of water were provided. The rest was improvised. The acoustic element and the sculptural quality of sound have always been essential to me in art, and in terms of music maybe my background in piano and cello drew me to them. Then there was the use of sound as a sculptural material to enlarge the whole understanding of sculpture from

the point of view of using materials. Therefore not only solid materials like metal, clay, stone, but also sound, noise, melody us109

ing language—all become the material of sculpture, and all acquire their form through thought, so thought too is taken as a sculptural means. That is an extreme position, the real transcendental position of production in general. During the time of his association with Fluxus, Beuys often worked on the concept of chaos. This led to the notion that chaos itself can generate a new situation—an idea which | share (indeed, can only hope is true, given the cultural and political chaos in which we find ourselves today). The principles of chaos and form lay at the heart of the position that Beuys occupied within Fluxus, where he tried to develop a theory which went beyond actions and happenings. As far as Beuys was concerned, the concept underlying Fluxus was a principle of evolution that could develop into a movement towards an ordering of human society. Thus, within Fluxus, he developed into a mature artist who asserted his own autonomy of ideas and expression. This was the startingpoint of the career that would establish Beuys's international reputation, making him a figure for whom people felt love or hate—in either case, a visceral emotion. This was the period of his first aktionen, which Bernard Lamarche-Vadel has described as “general metaphors of Beuys's art and thought” During one of his periods of involvement with Fluxus, Beuys ex plored the idea of Vehicle-Art—that is, art which is a vehicle at everyone's disposal; which is a functional instrument that might be used anywhere. Whilst he did not take part in the 1962 Festival Fluxus at Winiesbaden, this was the year when he developed his first Fluxus composition Das Erdklavier (The Earth Piano). And it was on the occasion of his very first participation at a Fluxus evening—vwhich he himself had organized within the Dùsseldorf Academy on February 2-3, 1963—that Beuys presented his first two aktionen: Siberischen Symphonie 1.Statz and Concerto for Two Instrumentalists. Beuys: This was my first public Fluxus appearance. | participated in compositions by George Maciunas, Alison Knowles, Addi Koepke and Dick Higgins and presented two of my own works. On the first night | performed a “Concert for two musicians.” It lasted for per haps twenty seconds, | dashed forward in the gap between two performances, wound up a clockwork toy, two drummers, on the piano, and let them play until the clockwork ran down. That was the end. The Fluxus people felt that this short action was my breakthrough, while the event of the second evening was perhaps too heavy, complicated and anthropological for them. Yet the “Siberian symphony, section 1" contained the essence ofall my future activities and was, | felt, a wider understanding of what Fluxus could be. Siberian symphony was a free composition for piano with some elements of “La Messe des pauvres” by Erik Satie and harmonies from his “Sonnerie de la Rose + Croix.” There was a Rosicrucian or 110

Joseph Beuys, Arena, work exhibited at “Contemporanea; 1973. Rome, Villa Borghese

anta

%

nf

at least a spiritual intention in this, though it would probably have been invisible even to Rosicrucians ... | tied a dead hare in front of the blackboard and prepared the piano with small heaps of clay. These were connected up with pine twigs and wire to form a kind of electric pylon system leading from the piano to the hare. The composition was above all an acoustic one, interrupted by a series of sentences written on the blackboard. They were wiped out and I've forgotten what they were, so you could say that this was an intuition that disappeared ... Then | gathered up the wire again and the action was finished ... | can still ‘remember the surprise on Dick Higgins’ face. He understood that this action had absolutely nothing to do with neo-Dada, or with neo-Dada attempts to shock the bourgeois. VVhen for instance | use the hare, which appears here for the first time in the flesh, the intention has nothing to do with that but with the expression of transformation through material, of birth and death. On July 18 that year Beuys also took part in an evening held at the Zwirner Gallery in Cologne, during which Allan Kaprow held the discussion “The Kolumba Cemetery" This was the occasion when Beuys first used animal fat—a material that would henceforth feature repeatedly in his work. That same year he also took part in the Fluxus group exhibition at the home of the van der Grinten brothers in Kranenburg. The summer of 1964 was an interesting and intense period for the artist, who took part in two important events. Invited to participate in Documenta Ill in Kassel, he showed drawings and sculptures from the period 1951-56, including the Queen Bees and SaFG-SaUG. This was his first major encounter with the public. On July 20 of that same year (the twentieth anniversary of the failed assassination attempt against Hitler), Beuys participated in the Festival of New Art in Aachen, with his aktion entitled Kukei/ akopee-Nein!/BrownKreuz/Fat Corners/Model Fat Corners. The work caused an uproar: Beuys: After making a quiet sculpture with ultra-violet beams | filled a grand piano with geometric shapes, sweets, dried oak leaves, marjoram, a postcard of Aachen Cathedral and soap powder. Very loosely, so that it was still plavable, but the tone was altered by the filling ... The piano was not ruined by me but by its former owners. lt had been part of the interior decor ... The intention: healing chaos, amorphous healing, in a particular direction through which the frozen and rigid forms of the past and of social convention, are dissolved and warmed, and future form becomes possible. Then | heated up a stove and melted the blocks of fat ... | never reached the “Model fat corner” part of my programme because in between was an action with a copper rod wrapped in felt now in the StrOher Collection. When | lifted this felt-covered copper rod above my head, the whole place exploded. It worked like a catalyst: this small object and simple action ... like an electric current. 112

Beuys: / did have the impression, when | packed all my things to go to Aachen,

that this might cause some

reaction, but | was not ex

pecting such an explosion. However primitive these means were, it seems they had the power to move areas of feeling in people which until then had been fairly untouched by the most gruesome depictions of human suffering, illness, want, concentration camps and so

on. Our consciousness does not always have its seven senses coordinated. For many people causal meaning as opposed to a-causal meaning is nonsense. In order to think in accordance with reality, both kinds of thinking are needed ... Actions, Happenings and Flux us will of course release new impulses which will, we hope, create better relationships in many areas. Then from this newly won stage of awareness new goals will in turn emerge. That's evolution. Beuys is referring to a “raid” organized by a group of right-wing students, one of whom punched him in the face and gave him a bloody nose. The police was called and order restored—but the aktion was brought to an end. Beuys stayed until late into the night, talking to the students, right-wing and left-wing; his ideas were attacked by both sides. The overall result of the event was Beuys's increased awareness that something was changing; that his work was moving in the right direction. The German press gave wide coverage to what had happened at Aachen, so the figure of Beuys began to attract attention, both desirable and undesirable. On November 11, 1964 Beuys made his first appearance on live television, in a programme on German television's Second Channel. Other participants included Bazon Brock, Thomas Schmit and Wolf Vostell. Beuys's contribution was the statement: Das Schweigen von Marcel Duchamp wird Uberbewertet (Marcel Duchamp's silence is overratedì). Beuys: This statement on Duchamp is highly ambivalent. It contains a criticism of Duchamp‘ Anti-art concept and equally of the cult of his later behaviour ... Apart from that, Duchamp had expressed a very negative opinion of the Fluxus artists, claiming that they had no new ideas since he had anticipated it all. Drawn into this framework, which refers specifically to Duchamp, is the interpretation of silence applied by Ingmar Bergman in his film “The Silence.” Seen from this point of view the statement acquires a complex breadth of interpretation. It can of course be left as a riddle, since it brings together many different impulses. Most prominent, though, is disapproval of Duchamp's Anti-art concept. My own introduction of the Anti-art concept was a methodical attempt to express the general problem in order to effect something within Fluxus that could extend to the whole of art. As far as |am concerned, the “Anti” refers to the redundant concept of art and its retreat into overspecialist isolation. Otherwise it would be meaningless, just as the other

pairs of concepts | often mention: mathematics and anti-mathematics, physics and anti-physics, etc., represent only limited sections of these fields. But both poles are necessary if wider concepts are to be achieved. 113

On December 1 that year he presented the aktion entitled The Chief at the René Block Gallery in West Berlin. This already hinted at the rich vocabulary that would feature in later works, as Tisdall commented: “From now on the meditative, ritualistic aspect replaces direct Fluxus provocation, and deeper levels of disturbance and questioning are the objectives. Actions are carefully arranged beforehand

with scores,

and their sculptural

nature,

even

down

to the use of specific materials like felt and fat, is unequivocal, as is the role of the artist himself as part of this sculptural process. More than performances,

these are demostrations

in real time of

Beuys's Theory of Sculpture, and their slow pace (nine hours in the case of The Chief emphasizes this and the deliberate psychological distancing of performer from audience. The acoustic element is always important, often as a demonstration of levels of communication other than written or spoken human semantics, and this is one reason why animals (stag, hare, horse, coyote) play a part, together with elements of autobiography that reach to areas of feeling beyond straightforward rational explanation.” \VVhat did this action consist in? Across the floor of the gallery— which measured 5 x 8 m—Beuys lay diagonally, wrapped up in a 2.25-metre roll of felt, within which a microphone had been placed. And there he lay for nine hours. A powerful amplifier/speaker was placed on the right wall of the gallery, broadcasting not only the artist's heartbeat but also the letters of the alphabet and words he mumbled to himself. Juxtaposed with these sounds were tape recordings of musical compositions by Anderson and Christiansen, two friends who were part of Fluxus. At the end of the roll of felt in which Beuys was wrapped there were also two dead hares—one measuring 64 cm in length, the other 70 cm—whilst alongside was a 1.7/8-metre copper rod, itself rolled in felt. To the left of the gallery space—at 1.65 metres above floor level—vwere hung a lock of hair and two fingernails; on the floor was a streak of animal fat measuring 1.57 metres in length. At the corners formed by two walls (both to the left and right of the space) was a “Fat Corner” The ritual began at 4pm and ended at midnight, when Beuys responded to questions posed by the public. Let us hear what he himself has to say. Beuys: For me “The Chief" was above all an important sound piece. The most recurrent sound was deep in the throat and hoarse like the cry of the stag: “6 6." This is a primary sound, reaching far back. Such a performance always has a theory behind it, a partitur or

score, which gives information without information. Acoustically it's lite using just the carrier wave as a conveyor of energy without loading it with semantic information. The wave carries the kind of sound usually found in the animal kingdom. The wave is unformed; semantics would give it form. The sounds | make are taken consciously from animals. | see it as a way of coming into contact with

other forms of existence, beyond the human one. It's a way of go-

ing beyond our restricted understanding to expand the scale of producers of energy among co-operators in other species, all of whom 114

have different abilities. This means that my presence there in the felt was like that of a carrier wave, attempting to switch off my own species’ range of semantics. It was a parallel to the old initiation of the coffin, a form of mock death. It takes a lot of discipline to avoid panicking in such a condition, floating empty and devoid of emotion and without specific feelings of claustrophobia or pain, for nine hours in the same position. Such an action, and indeed every action, changes me radically. In a way it's a death, a real action and not an interpretation. Theme: how does one become a revolutionary? That's the problem. 1965 saw two important aktionen. The first was held at the Par nass Gallery in Wuppertal on June 5, during a Fluxus happening that ran from midnight to midnight; along with Beuys, the others participants were Bazon Brock, Charlotte Moorman, Nam June Paik, Thomas Schmit and Wolf Vostell. The event was entitled 24 hours, while Beuys's own aktion was called ... and in us... under us...underground... For the entire time, he remained standing on a crate performing various gestures, including that of holding a special twohandled spade. Beuys: First of all these two handles off one spade signify a special kind of compound action for people working the earth together. Without the spirit of cooperation, harmony and even humour it would be impossible to work with the tool. Brotherhood and love are suggested by the heart shape of the iron blade, while the handles are like aorta or arteries. So there is a relationship to the bloodstream here, and iron too is an important component of blood. During the action “24 hours” | held the spade at heart level and sometimes raised it above my head, which required balance. From time to time the spades were rammed into the floor or thrown like spears. That made a rather acoustic interruption of the tempo, as often happens in my actions. The relationship to agriculture is evident, as are the warmth and love needed for a regeneration of the earth. Spectators and visitors used the spades to dig furrows before and after the action.

Entitled How to Explain Pictures to a Dead Hare, the second aktion took place at the Schmela Gallery in DUsseldorf on November 26, 1965. Amongst the most famous of the artist's aktionen, thist—to-

gether with Coyote, which took place in New York in 1974—is per haps that which most inspired the public imagination. The gallery was closed to the public, with the aktion being filmed and visible either via a monitor or by peering in through a window. His head covered in honey and gold purpurin, Beuys either sat on a stool or walked back and forth to blackboards on the walls, all the time explaining the meaning of art to a dead hare that he cradled in his arms like a little child. One leg of the stool was wrapped in felt; and there were two bones beneath the stool. Beuys's right foot rested on a heavy steel sole 115

upon which was superimposed a sole in felt. Within the two bones and the sole microphones were concealed, transmitting the incomprehensible phrases that the artist muttered to the hare and the sound he made as he walked. The photographs of this aktion attracted enormous publicity (good and bad) and served to make the work of Joseph Beuys famous. Beuys: The hare has a direct relationship with birth ... That's what the hare demonstrates to us all when he hollows out his form: the movement of incarnation. The hare incarnates himself into the earth, which is what we human beings can only radically achieve with our thinking: he rubs, pushes, digs himself into Materia (earth); finally penetrates (rabbit) its laws, and through this work his thinking is sharpened then transformed, and becomes revolutionary. Gold and honey indicate a transformation of the head, and therefore, naturally and logically, the brain and our understanding of thought, consciousness and all the other levels necessary to explain pictures to a hare: the warm stool insulated with felt, the “radio” made of bone and electrical components under the stool and the iron sole with the magnet. | had to walk on this sole when | carried the hare round from picture to picture, so along with a strange limp came the clank of iron on the hard stone floor—that was all that broke the silence, since my explanations were mute, and the radio was on an almost inaudible wavelength. This seems to have been the action that most captured people's imaginations. On one level this must be because everyone consciously or unconsciously recognizes the problem of explaining things, particularly where art and creative work are concerned, or anything that involves a certain mystery or questioning. The idea of explaining to an animal conveys a sense of the secrecy of the world and of existence that appeals to the imagination. Then, as | said, even a dead animal preserves more powers of intuition than some human beings with their stubborn rationality. The problem lies in the word UNDERSTANDING and its many levels which cannot be restricted to rational analysis. Imagination, inspiration, intuition and longing all lead people to sense that these other levels also play a part in understanding. This must be the root of reactions to this action, and is why my technique has been to try to seek out the energy points in the human power field, rather than demanding specific knowledge or reactions on the part of the public. I try to bring to light the complexity of creative areas.

The following year (1966) saw three events in particular. The first took place in a room of the Dusseldorf Academy of Fine Arts on July 7 and was an aktion entitled /nfiltration Homogen fiir Konzertfltgel, der gròlte Komponist der Gegenwart ist das Centergankind (Ho-

mogenous Infiltration for a Grand Piano; the Greatest Contemporary Composer is the Thalidomide Child). Beuys here introduced an oral element by engaging with the public in a discussion—complete 116

with blackboard diagrams and schema—of the issue of the thalidomide child and the divisions of the cross. The grand piano covered in felt which was part of this aktion is one of the most famous objects ever created by the artist and is now in the collection of the Centre Pompidou, Paris. With regard to this object: Beuys: The sound of the piano is trapped inside the felt skin. In the normal sense a piano is an instrument used to produce sound. VVhen not in use it is silent, but still has a sound potential. Here, no sound is possible and the piano is condemned to silence. “Infiltration-homogen” describes the character and structure of felt, so the piano becomes an homogeneous deposit of sound with the potential to filter through felt. The relationship to the human position is marked by the two red crosses signifving emergency: the danger that threatens if we stay silent and fail to make the next evolutionary step. Such an object is intended as a stimulus for discussion, and in no way is it to be taken as an aesthetic product. This aktion might be said to explore suffering, which is a recurrent theme in Beuys's work, the individual and collective wound being analyzed as positive in itself, a stage towards human transformation. Beuys would always explore this issue with great interest and empathy, aiming to underline the positive nature—the spiritual basis—of suffering. For him, this is a fundamental part of life; it implies an awakening and extension of one's own faculties. Suffering widens the scope of existence—vwhich Beuys sees as a shifting and transitory process; it is in suffering that time and space—and their place in human consciousness—are made concretely present to us. The wound is a necessary step towards recovery and healing. From a spiritual point of view, Beuys saw suffering as something that amplifies an individual's faculties, transporting him into a wider and more absolute realm of existence. Thus the Thalidomide child— whose entire life is marked by suffering—unites within himself all the complex links within existence. And given that he does so, such a child might be taken as the paradigm of spiritual existence, might be seen as “the greatest contemporary composer. Another interesting aktion was that held on October 14-15, 1966 at the 101 Gallery in Copenhagen. Entitled Eurasia. 34. Statz der Sibirischen Symphonie (Eurasia. 34th Movement of the Siberian Symphony), this brought together the salient concepts of Beuys's thought in a very articulate form. The introductory theme was “The Division of the Cross” Kneeling, Beuys pushed two small crosses along the floor towards a blackboard on which he drew a cross and then erased half of it, writing the word Eurasia. He then continued by manipulating a dead hare raised on two long thin rods attached to its feet and ears. Having made the hare move and turn, he brought it to the blackboard, covered its paws with white powder, put a thermometer in its mouth and blew into a tube. Then, still alongside the blackboard, he made the hare's ears twitch, whilst stamping vigorously with the 117

iron sole attached to his foot against another sole on the floor. The following text was written by the Danish journalist Andersen, who was amongst the public during the course of these two evenings. "At first sight, he [Beuys] seems like a cross between a clown and a gangster. But as soon as he is in action, he is changed, absorbed in his performance, he is intense and evocative. He employs very simple symbols. His longest performance of the two evenings was a

1% hour long segment from his “Siberian Symphony." The introductory motif was “the Division of the Cross!” Kneeling, Beuys slowly pushes two small crosses that lie on the floor toward a blackboard. On each cross is placed a watch with a set alarm device. On the board he draws a cross, erases half of it, and then writes under it “EURASIA” The rest of the piece is comprised of Beuys Maneuvering along a drawn line a dead hare whose legs and ears are lengthened with long thin black wooden sticks. When Beuys has the hare on his shoulder, the sticks touch the floor. From the wall Beuys goes to the blackboard, where he deposits the hare. On the way back three things happen. He sprinkles white powder between the legs of the hare, places a thermometer in its mouth, and blows into a pipe. After this he turns to the board with the half cross and lets the rabbit smell with its ears, during which he lets one of his feet, to which an iron plate is tied, hang over another plate on the floor. Every so often he stamps his foot on the plate. That was the main content of the aktion. The symbols are perfectly clear and can be read by everyone. The division of the cross: the division between East and West, Rome and Byzantium. The half cross: the meeting of Europe and Asia, the area within which the hare moves. The iron sole on the floor is a metaphor: walking is difficult and the ground is frozen. The three interruptions in the return refer to the elements: snow, cold, wind. All of this can be understood if one grasps the reference: siberiana. But, naturally, the actual meaning of the symbols is of subsidiary importance. What Beuys is presenting/representing is not some sketch for a philosophy of culture. The concentration with which he proceeds makes it clear that a person who expends himself to this extent is not working within a few rules established for just this occasion. His actions acquire perspective; they penetrate so deeply because they are only one part of an entire context of comprehension. The hare's paws, the sad, thin rods — these indicate a sense of space. The ancient symbolic significance of the hare also affects the home — a sign of the transient, the fleeting. Man and animal form a precarious unity, unified against the space which surrounds them. Beuys: Here the suggestion was that the hare becomes a coactor. In moving the ears on the long sticks | created echoes of the angles that appear in “Fat” and “Felt corners.” The final blackboard records two such angles together with two special temperatures, one for felt, 32°, and one for fat, 21°. ... The third temperature has a clear reason: 42° centigrade—it means a dan118

gerous fever level, and hence the presence of the thermometer. The element of fire was represented by the sparks of a flint while I recited fragments of German Romantic poetry. The most impor tant line was Justinus Kerner's “Wo du hingehst da will auch ich TIAPONET hingehen": “Where you go, there will | go too.” The last aktion of 1966 took place on December 15 at the Schmela Gallery in Dusseldorf and involved the artist Biérn Nòrgard and the Danish musician Henning Christiansen; Beuys would often work with the latter. Manresa, the title of this aktion, referred to the Catalonian village in the Pyrenees where Ignatius Loyola, recover ing from the wounds received in battle, would undergo a profound meditative experience that would lead him in 1523 to start writing his Spiritual Exercises. Beuys had visited the place and, for him, Manresa was somewhere that marked a point of initiation in the unfolding history of the West; it was here that a precious example of meditation and discipline had been supplied, opening the way to ever higher levels of human thought. Thus a central notion attached to Manresa was Beuys's conviction that intuition was the highest form of reason, because it could reveal levels of perception and understanding that went beyond rational analysis. For Beuys, intuition exemplified the expansion of the usual limited forms of thought; it was the achievement that brought together both “qualitative” and “quantitative” thought. Hence the question that indicates a striving for synthesis, for a determination of the right direction: “Where is Element 3?" With musical accompaniment provided by Christiansen playing the organ, the aktion entitled Eurasienstab 82 min, Fluxorum Organum took place on February 10, 1967 at the St. Stephen's Gallery in Vienna. This work took up the themes of Eurasia, with the new addition of the Eurasienstab (Eurasian Staff) —a 50-kilo copper rod measuring 3.64 metres in length, which Beuys manipulated in various ways during the entire performance. The image conjured up that of Beuys the child, who loved to wander around the fields with a shepherd's staff. Once again this is an image that is the fruit of a subjective childnood fantasy, which in the adult takes on plausible meaning and a fully objective role. Again with Christiansen, Beuys would put on Hauptstrom (Current) at the Franz Dahlem Gallery in Darmstadt on March 20. The following is his own description. Beuys: There was a lot of concentrated aggression in “Mainstream, closely integrated with the fat as material, biting it jumping around lite a hare in the slippery space, repairing the walls. The “fat cor ners” made on my body were also done with the jerkings of an epileptic fit like the initiation ceremony. On the wall were different markings with brown (cross) paint, one flag-likte shape round which | scratched with the acoustic tin. There was a brown trapezoid form too, a pair of revolving triangles, and a brown line along the wall. On the floor was a figuration of fat wedges indicating armpits, legs and 119

groin, over which | lay. The acoustic instrument | held to my ear was a cone of fat stiffened with wax moulded from a clay groove during the action. The rod was very flexible, and as the tension with the audience increased | bent it even more. The stress is on the sculptural nature of hearing: “Hear aright!” When | stood erect | wore a triangular filter of gauze over my groin. It was around this time that a student was killed during a protest demonstration in Berlin. Beuys's immediate reaction was a very passionate one and he wanted to make himself the spokesman for the students themselves, adding that “very often young people do not manage properly to express their grievances." Thus on June 22, 1967 he founded the German Student Party, the DSP the first of his politi cal organizations. From September 13 to October 20 that same year Beuys was at the Stàdtisches Museum in Mònchengladbach, where he organized the important exhibition Parallel Prozel (Parallel Process), which included material taken from the aktionen of previous years. About two thirds of the works exhibited were acquired by Karl Stréher, who became a passionate collector of Beuys's work. The following year, 1968, Beuys would participate at Documenta IV from June 27 to October 6; this was an occasion that revealed increasing international recognition of his work. In a Sculpture Room, measur ing 10 by 12 metres, he exhibited various pieces, including some from the 1950s. The most important were: Rubberized Box (1957); objects from The Chef (1964); the Bed abandoned by Myself and my Love (1965), objects from Eurasienstab (1967); Fond II (1968). At the Wide White Space gallery in Antwerp he would, from September 20 to 29 that same year, exhibit two very well known works: Fiz — Tv (Felt TV) and Das Frdtelephon (Earth Telephone), both produced that year. On October 14 he presented the aktion entitled Vakuum Masse at Art Intermedia in Cologne. This consisted of filling an iron container in the shape of half a cross with 100 kg of animal fat and 100 bicycle pumps, and then welding it shut along its upper surface. Enclosed within the half-cross, iron, animal fat and bicycle pumps continued to be subject to chemical changes, thus were in a continuous state of movement and transformation. On January 29, 1969, Beuys exhibited Fond Ill at the Schmela Gallery in Dusseldorf. The work was so austere and stark that it suggested similarities with that of the American Minimal ists. However, there was a profound and substantial difference, as Beuys himself explains. Beuys: My actions and methods have absolutely nothing to do with vanity and transitoriness. It is only right that they are unsightly and poor looking materials, but they have nothing to do with vanity. We discussed this at the beginning, about how much childhood impressions and experiences can form an image and materials, but that in itself is the opposite of vanity. They are merely minimal materials and here one could speak of a connection to minimal art. Why people like Bob Morris, for example, have been interested in felt, is 120

fairly clear. It is clear at that time and had art means absolutely role that Italians have

what Morris has taken from me; he was here worked in my studio. The concept of minimal nothing to me. In “arte povera” vanity plays a grafted on.

Unlike Minimal Art, Beuys's work placed no particular importance on certain spatial references nor upon unreserved autonomy of form. The reduction of sculpture to a standardized model was, in fact, a radical contradiction of Beuys's own idea of what constituted sculpture. The work in question consisted of nine enormous batteries, each one made up of hundreds of layers of grey felt surmounted by a shiny sheet of copper. These batteries are so high that the spectator has difficult in distinguishing between them; their location in space is not predetermined but varies in accordance with their setting. Beuys had already produced other works of similar title: Double Fond (1954), Fond O (1957), Fond | (1957), Fond II (1958)—and later (in 1970-74) would create Fond /V/4. All of them explore this theme of batteries, which is here made more explicit in the use of felt to suggest aggregate and copper plate to suggest conductors. For Beuys, the accumulation of felt evoked ideas of the retention of heat, of a situation charged with energy. This is what the journalist Georg Jappe, writing in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, had to say about this work: “Nine mighty piles of felt, each constructed of a hundred thick grey sheets of felt covered by a brand new sheet of copper, spread, under melancholy lighting, the oppressive atmosphere of a depot in which stockpiled material waits activity as if unfulfilled. The calm rectangles of the piles can barely be distinguished one from another by the height of their surfaces and the shadow lines along them, and can be placed so close together that the copper plates overlap, but they can also tower up next to each other and evoke their own space ... At the very time when Minimal Art has exhausted itself while still being the latest Movement, Beuys demonstrates how Minimal Art can be integrated and overcome. Beuys frees objects from their architectonic usefulness/function and their model character. They are there for what they are. lt is not their strangeness he evokes but their existence. The only decisive intervention is the choice of material and its size, used to determine the fundamental constellation of mass and space. But this is no dead or anonymous mass—these objects are probes: batteries and transmission space, interdependent. VVhat interests me in felt is not its haptic nature as has often been thought but insulation. This declaration opens up many possibilities. A sculptor searches for a material with which successfully to represent ‘insulation’: First / used rubber, but that did not satisfy me. Because it was too direct too didactic and therefore quickly redundant. Batteries as enormous mountains of felt a piano swathed in felt a German Student Party against Verfil/zung (‘felting’ or matted, inert chaos). The controversy about Beuys stemmed from a failure to grasp that his works, actions and teaching were a metaphor—a 121

metaphor that now acquires an irritating reality ... In art there is still the possibility of grasping things in visible form. Art is a method by which a comprehensive exploration of human evolution and inner anatomy can be made concrete. Hence it is not provocation but consistency that led Beuys to call the German Student Party his greatest artwork, for it is through people that ideas move forward, while in art they atrophy as a residual product, and eventually are left behind." On February 27 1969 the presentation of the aktion entitled / strive to free you (to make you free) at the Berlin Art Academy was interrupted after thirty minutes by a group of left-wing students. If in 1964 at Aachen Beuys had seemed too revolutionary to rightwing students, now the opposite side was criticising him bitterly for not pursuing true revolutionary aims, accusing him of being a retrograde passéist. In May 1969 Beuys figured at the Experimenta 3 theatre festival in Frankfurt, presenting an interesting fusion of Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus and Goethe's /phigenia: Iphigenia/Titus Andronicus (ein aktion). Loudspeakers played the prerecorded voices of two actors reading extracts from the two plays, while the stage was divided into two parts: one side was empty, and represented Titus, and the other was occupied by Beuys and a white horse standing on a sheet of iron that amplified the noise of its hooves. Vvrapped in a splendid white fur, Beuys represented Iphigenia and his appearance

was in a sense reflected in that of the horse. All around him there were chalk traces of diagrams and the “score” for the unfolding of the performance. There were also lumps of animal fat, which every now and again he spat into the Titus space, and lumps of sugar, which he used to beat out a rhythm. The emphasis on sound in the whole aktion was underlined in the preparatory drawings, which illustrate the plastic potential of the voice. During the performance another acoustic element was added: the loud noise of the plates upon which Beuys beat out an accentuated rhythm when the public gave clear signs of becoming restless. On March 2, 1970 Beuys founded his second political body: the Organization of Non-Voters. Free Referendum, with an Information Office in Dusseldorf (at 25 Andreasstrasse). His intention was to extend the range of a party that otherwise would remain the exclusive domain of students. In August that year Beuys was in Scotland, invited to take part in the event “Strategy becomes Art - Contemporary Art from Dusseldorf” being held at the Edinburgh College of Art. By the end of the 1960s he had become a controversial figure in Germany, but was also well-known in Holland, Belgium and Switzerland, as well as being a familiar name world-wide to those who read specialist art magazines. It was characteristic of Beuys that for his first appearance in the English-speaking world he should have chosen a rather “peripheral” area. This was in line with his interest in those marginal geographical areas that are rich in human potential and his love for the mythology and culture of the Celtic world—as 122

would subsequently be confirmed by his numerous visits to land, Eire and Northern Ireland. For that Edinburgh exhibition Beuys created the aktion entitled ic (Kinloch Rannoch) (Scottish Symphony) and also one of his fascinating works: The Pack. This is how he himself describes

ScotCeltmost it.

Beuys: This is an emergency object: an invasion by “The Pack.” In a state of emergency the Volkswagen bus is of limited usefulness, and more direct and primitive means must be taken to ensure sur vival. The most direct kind of movement over the earth is the sliding of the iron runners of the sleds, shown at other times as a skating figure or suggested by the iron soles placed on my feet in Eurasia. This relationship between feet and earth is made in many sculptures, which always run along the ground. Each sled carries its own survival kit: the flash light represents the sense of orientation, then felt for protection, and fat is food. On a purely formal level, this, like “Vakuum@>Masse," is a filled sculpture, rare in art, common in life. Beuys: On the trip to Edinburgh, | had absolutely no idea of what I was going to do. | only knew that | was going to give a concert there. | had ordered film, a piano, and many other things. | did not know what had arrived. | only knew that | was to give a concert. | prepared myself inwardly. Upon my arrival, | saw an old staff. It seemed to be important; | needed it. On the way | saw an ax in a store, which | bought; | might be able to make use of that too. | brought the ax, and even though | didn't use it, it was good that it stood there. Then | began. | looked around the room and began to touch everything a little and to develop the appropriate symbols and to form a time plan. Then Henning Christiansen came. We simply began... The place was important. | say, we only live once on this planet as a living organism, so the place in which we live plays an important role. Initiallv as a simple question: What is Scotland? What is it? Then | began to smell, | put out my antennae and immediately received impressions. Immediately. Impressions that | had been car rying around inside of me for a long time: Scotland, King ArthurSs Round Table, the story of the Holy Grail. These elements combined and continued to work in me for several days. Reason for preliminary work. One must not value it simply as a full score. The preliminary work is connected to my life. On April 6 the following year Beuys would present in Basel the aktion entitled Celtic + ----. Though basically a variation on the Edinburgh piece, here the ritual aspect was of heightened symbolic significance. In effect, the ritual explored the concept of purification, of liberation from false preconceptions; the reference to “the

washing of the feet” also highlighted the cooperation that is part of human labour and endeavour. Beuys began the aktion by washing the feet of seven spectators and ended it with his own immer sion in water, in a sort of simulated baptism; the whole aktion was 123

an ambiguous simulation that drew upon both Christian and pagan symbolism. There was also reference to chemical principles: to be seen in the interpretation one might offer of the powerful light generated by two pocket torches fixed at the back of Beuys's legs just above the knee. It was this illumination which gave each gesture and action a powerful symbolic presence. The washing of the feet was also an invitation to follow the example given: to work for others. The various actions that made up the central part of the performance—pushing a blackboard across the floor; the projection of three films that refer to aktionen of previous years (Eurasienstab, Vakuum Masse, and Trans-Siberian Railway); the use of gelatin smeared on the wall and thrown onto the artist's own body—all of these used movement as an indication of developing awareness; they suggested movement and travel as a journey towards the elimination of conflicts, towards the reunification of that which had been dispersed. In effect, the work expressed a fully-present awareness of a theological problem. The aktion then continued with a pause, Beuys remaining immobile for more than half an hour. His eyes staring into space and his hand grasping a lance, he stood on guard, defending the image of the grail that he had drawn upon the blackboard. And in this posture of defence, the lance takes on the character of an antenna that both receives and transmits. A final baptism concluded the logical circle of the aktion, with the dominant symbolism of the water bringing us back to the initial action of the washing of the feet. It is inter esting to note here what Jean-Christophe Ammamm, Curator of the Basel Kunsthalle, wrote: “What does ‘Celtic’ mean? In order to understand it you must assume that every gesture and action possesses a symbolic character. Beuys's concern is universal. Life and death, the story of creation, mankind and the power of its consciousness are all basic themes. ‘Celtic’ has charismatic traits: to begin with, the foot washing is a summons to do the same. A performance that shows the situation for the entire action by virtue of its symbolism. The pushing of the board across the floor, which marked each stage with a new drawing, can be understood as a symbol of the development of the consciousness. The three films show the wide perspective of Beuys's ‘Celtic’: the most important motif in the films' formulated statements is the motif of the trip, in the sense of an elimination of antitheses and a bringing together. The collection of the translucent mass—one is reminded of a honey gatherer—again acquires the meaning of a trip: the strewn and isolated will be united, the cosmic will be united to an act of consciousness of teleological dimensions. Similarly, when Beuys throws the mass over himself and holds the board with the grail drawing over him, he stands as a man and protector of the

grail with the tip of the spear, which has the meaning of a polarized antenna, namely to act as a sender and receiver. The baptism at the end closes the circle of the action and points again to the beginning. 124

On May 12, 1971 Beuys celebrated his 50th birthday. At the Dùsseldorf Academy his students organized a large party, presenting improvised “actions” in honour of their teacher. Pursuing the direction he had already taken in the foundation of political bodies, Beuys would—on June 1, 1971—found the Organi zation for Direct Democracy through Referendums. Offering a more effective focus for the aims of the previous bodies, this occupied the same headquarters at 25 Andreasstrasse.

Beuys: / have come to the conclusion that there is no other possibility to do something for man other than through art. And to do this I need an educational concept; | need a conception of perception theory, and | must negotiate. Thus there are three things that belong under one roof. The educational concept refers to the fact that man is a creative being; it is very important to make him conscious of that: to create an awareness of the fact that he is a creative being and a free being and that for these reasons he must inevitably behave in an anti-authoritarian fashion. The conception of perception theory confirms that only the creative man can change history, can use his creativity in a revolutionary way. To go back one step to my educational concept, it would mean: art equals creativity equals human freedom... the transformation of the social situation as it is now and how it repressively affects mankind, which we call the majority of the workers or the proletariat, is under consideration at this Moment. All of these things belong to my educational concept, in order for it to function practically and politically. We inform people about the current situation and about the path which is accessible to organize and account for it. In order to make people fit for this principle of free referendum and self-determination, we must or ganize them into a position of power, so that one day they can stand in concurrence, for example, to undertake the party state or formal democracy. All executive power should come from the people, but how this is possible is what we teach and at the same time organize. When the majority of men have agreed that there is only one way, for example, to change the fundamental law, then they will simply proceed to a referendum. They will say “we have recognized that it no longer makes sense to delegate our voice to a man who as a party politician has nothing more in mind than to take seriously only the interests of his party. Ve do not want to delegate any more men, we do not want any representatives or formal democracy, we want to determine ourselves now, and we want to proceed to a referendum over the issue of means of production,” for example, that is the pressing point... When the majority decides that, then it is valid as law. Or the few who hold power destroy their credibility as democrats. Those who hold power today want democracy, or so they say. Then they will very simply experience that they must take seriously the fact that the majority has created a law against which they transgress. And then the so-called executive power of the people is employed, passes the law, and transgression is no longer possible. 125

At Eindhoven (Holland) on August 17 the beautiful installation / Want to See My Mountains went on display for the first time. A note warned the public: “The title of this work doesn't reflect what we actually see. The question that is posed regards what is there to be seen” Here it is important to consider what Caroline Tisdall wrote: “What is to be seen is an arrangement of familiar and autobiographic objects: the furniture that was once in Beuys's room in Cleves and Dùsseldorf-Heerdt, now assembled on an energy field of copper sheets with a bulb burning over a felt insulating circle in the centre, and with sealed jars of gelatine in the four corners. On each of the objects is chalked a word which gives access to the second layer of meaning: the bed with fine copper filter in place of mattress and a small photograph of Beuys in bed, shepherd's staff in hand is ‘Walun' (Valley); the wardrobe with its oval mirror is ‘Vadrec(t)'—a Celtic word for glacier; the tall upright packing case is ‘Felsen' (Cliff); the wooden box containing (unseen) a yellow cloth and human bone bears on its side the word ‘Sciora'——a mountain chain in Switzerland. On the sulphur-yellow stool is a mirror, its shine made dully translucent with a fine coating of fat and dust. On the back of the mir ror is written ‘Cime, the spirit of the mountain appearing again. The cumulative effect of all these elements should lead to the third level of meaning. Each has appeared before in Beuys's vocabulary, characterizing some part of nature. Everything in the environment is transferred to human nature, with all its diverse aspects. The long-for mountains of the title are within oneself, and the reality is psychological. On the wall hangs a Mannlicher Schònauer rifle, adding a dramatic dimension to the whole, a touch of the hunter's or the partisan's refuge. The rifle is aimed at a bird painted on the cupboard, and on its butt is written ‘Denken'—Think. Abstract thought kills everything, and here it is focused on a living thing, the bird. Thinking and the dead aspect of thought are part of a dying process. Here the criticism of abstract thought is represented by the narrow aiming associations of the gun” On September 17 the new premises of the Schmela Gallery in Dùsseldorf opened. Beuys had worked with this gallery since 1965, and for the occasion presented the exhibition/aktion entitled Barraque d'dull Odde. Again in September he was invited to Naples by the gallery-owner Lucio Amelio. This was Beuys first, semi-official, visit to Italy and on Capri he created the “score”: VVe are the Revolution. Together with the Californian artist Terry Fox, he would—on October 4—present the aktion Isolation Unitatthe Dusseldorf Academy. This saw the first appearance of the famous felt suit worn by Beuys, which thereafter would become one of the artist's most important multiples. On November 13, 1971 Beuys was at the Galleria Modern Art

Agency in Naples, where—invited 126

by Lucio Amelio—he

held his

first official exhibition in Italy; this comprised 130 drawings (from 1946 to 1971), two films, one videotape, a sound work and a public discussion. On December 14 he played a leading role in an important environmental aktion entitled The Party-Dictator finally Wins. Together with fifty of his students from the Dùsseldorf Academy, he went into the Grafenberger Forest near the city to demonstrate against the planned cutting-down of trees to make way for the new tennis courts of a private club. The woodland was a recreational area used by the general public, and the aktion consisted in sweeping the pathways through the wood and marking the trees to be cut down with white crosses and circles. Beuys: Everyone talks about environmental protection, but very few do anything about it. Ve made our contribution with this action; the trees that are going to be eliminated here are vital for future generations. On April 12, 1972 Beuys was at the /ncontri Internazionali d'Arte in Roma to present VVe are the Revolution. The artist had always been firmly opposed to any kind of violence, arguing that it was true intellectual autonomy that one had to acquire; it was this which would allow one to take an innovative and radical approach to reality. In effect, revolution is within us; the only revolution possible is a revolution of ideas, which itself is a product of evolution and development. On June 10, 1972 Beuys was back at the Modern Art Agency in Naples, where he had exhibited the previous year. This time he presented Vitex Agnus Castus. For four hours he lay face-down on the floor rubbing his oil-soaked fingers across a stacked pile of copper and iron plates separated by layers of animal fat and wax. Along his back he had a long cobaltblue ribbon on which the words Vitex Agnus Castus were written in sulphur. The whole meaning of the aktion is encapsulated in the name of this plant, which in the Mediterranean area is commonly known as the “chaste tree. In Classical Antiguity this tree was used by the Greeks and Romans for sacrifices to Ceres; the first temples to that goddess were built where that tree grew; its leaves were used as bedding and, when distilled, provided a potion that served to reduce sexual urges and the temptations of the flesh. Vhilst combining vitex agnus castus with the chill hues of cobalt and the warmth of sulphur yellow, the artist's manual contact served to render the female element of copper active. Beuys wanted to assert the role of man in activating

energy. following pages Joseph Beuys with his famous Ombrello. Castello di Rivoli, December 1984

Beuys: Energy emanates from the two poles, male and female. My action drew them together. | mean a different concept of chastity produced by this reaction and the conflict of elements. 127

This battery of alternating male and female elements was also included in another exhibition that Beuys held on October 30 that year: Arena, at Fabio Sargentini's Galleria Attico in Rome. The exhibition included around 400 photographs of Beuys's previ ous aktionen; treated with acids, animal fats and wax, these were mounted in aluminium frames. Documenting the continuity, method and sheer hard work in Beuys's art, these image in some ways developed upon the autobiographical tendency that was already to be seen in the installation / want to see my Mountains. Later, this autobiographical work culminated in the 100 photographs of the operation Defence of Nature, which were selected and signed by Beuys. The aktion that accompanied the presentation of Arena was very significant. Wrapped up in a military greatcoat, the artist walked around the gallery reading aloud some notes regarding the life and deeds of the German anarchist Anacharsis Cloots (17551794), a hero who was finally beheaded for having championed an “internazionale of free beings” that was opposed to all sorts of nationalism. Having concluded his reading, Beuys repeated Cloots's gesture before his death: a triple bow that expressed the key triad of Liberté, Fraternité and Egalité—the dream of all humankind. Beuys would repeat the gesture at Castello di Rivoli during the installation of the majestic work Olivestone (this theme is discussed in the Fifth Station). From June 30 to October 8, 1972 Beuys took part in Documenta V at Kassel. He did not present any new work, but in the space at his disposal he set up an Information Office of the Organization for Direct Democracy through Referendums. The work envisaged by Beuys used the words, discussions and ideas produced by the curious public who came into the space. Amongst the various exchanges with the public was one with a man who told Beuys that the exhibition was a failure precisely because no one was interested in what was being proposed. Beuys responded that part of the failure lay with the visitors, because they were no longer capable of giving something of themselves. In the course of one day the Information Office attracted a total of 811 visitors, 35 of whom took part in the discussion. Upon returning home on October 15, Beuys learnt of his dismissal (effective immediately) from the post of Professor at the Dusseldorf Academy. This issue—plus the wider one of Beuys's relations with the governing bodies involved in education and academia—is more extensively discussed in Section Four. 1973 did not see any work of particular importance; furthermore Beuys had to abandone teaching entirely. In October of that year, however, he would make his first visit to Pescara, a guest at our villa in San Silvestro Colli. The German artist was particularly attracted by the natural landscape of the place, and by the work carried on at the agricultural estates of my husband, Buby Durini. So, with regard to this period, one should note in particular the be130

Joseph Beuys in Abruzzo for the first time, atVilla Durini. San Silvestro Colli, 1973

ginning of Beuys's collaboration and friendship with myself and my husband, as will be explored in the Fifth Station. In November 1973 the underground garage at Villa Borghese hosted one of the most spectacular and interesting collective exhibitions of contemporary art ever mounted—something that lay entirely outside the conventions of such bureaucratic events as the various Biennales and so on. There were three key aspects to the exhibition: an exploration of recent history and artistic trends; ex perimentation that expanded beyond the disciplinary boundaries between the figurative arts; and the presence of artists from all over the world, actively engaged in presenting and exhibiting their own work. One should also stress that this very a-typical setting was perfectly suited to such a large-scale event, whose flawless organization reflected a profound sense of cultural responsibility. Helped by friends and assistants, Beuys masterfully used a space of almost 1000 square metres to present his work Arena, which had already been exhibited in Italy. On that occasion he would also return to visit Abruzzo with Klaus Steack, with numerous such visits being made over the coming years. Together with one of the leading figures in German cultural lite—the Nobel-prize author Heinrich Boll, a figure with whom he had had close artistic links since the foundation of Free College in 1972— Beuys would in February 1974 found the Free International Univer sity (FI.U.). Perhaps the most important expression of his desire to move beyond the prevailing models of such institutions, this will be discussed in the Fourth Station.

On April 7 he opened the exhibition The Secret Block for a Secret Person in Ireland, at the Oxford Museum of Modern Art. This included 266 images (drawings and tempera) produced between 1936 and 1972. Forming a single indivisible work that came entirely from Beuys's own personal collection, this exhibition would then travel to Edinburgh, London, Dublin and Belfast. In New York in May 1974 Beuys was the leading figure in one of the most extraordinary aktionen of the 1970s: / Like America and America Likes Me. Better known as Coyote, this began with the moment in which his dealer, René Block—for whom he felt a great affection—announced the exhibition. It is important, however, to describe the entire aktion. An ambulance arrived at Beuys's home in Dùsseldorf. Wrapped up in a roll of felt and carried on a stretcher, he was then transported to the airport and put on a plane for New York. At Kennedy Airport another ambulance was waiting to take him to the gallery, where he was removed from the protective felt; at the same time, a coyote— just captured in the desert—was set free. Beuys and the coyote remained in each other's company for three days. In one corner there was straw, with cut pieces of felt on the 132

Joseph Beuys at the “Contemporanea” exhibition, 1973. Rome, Villa Borghese

te

naCna

=

SE =

floor and—near the grating that divided this space from the publie—copies of the Wall Street Journal, which were delivered daily. Accompanied with photographs, this work was linked with the situation of a man sentenced to life imprisonment in Glasgow's Barlinnie Prison. Called Jimmy Boyle, that man had just recently taken up sculpture, producing a highly symbolic work in which the head of a coyote was surmounted by a bust of Joseph Beuys. Having learnt about the piece, Beuys goes to see Boyle, who gives him the statue—and thus the aktion came to an end. The best narrative of the whole event is undoubtedly that written by Caroline Tisdall: “For the Indians, the coyote was one of the most mighty of a whole range of deities. He was an image of transformation, and, like the hare and the stag in Eurasian myths, he could

Joseph Beuys, Klaus Staeck and Lucrezia De Domizio visiting

the space on Via delle Caserme 44, Pescara, 1973

change his state from the physical to the spiritual and vice versa at will. His sexual prowess was redoubtable, and he could even turn inside out through his anus... Then came the White Man, and the transition in the coyote's status. He was reduced from being an admirably subversive power on a cosmic scale to what Jung in his preface to Pueblo Indian legends called ‘the Archetype of the Trickster' His ingenuity and adaptability were now interpreted as low and common cunning: he became the mean coyote. And having classed him as an antisocial menace, white society could take its legalized revenge on him, and hound him like a Dillinger. The man had brought objects and elements from his world to place in this space, silent representatives of his ideas and beliefs. He introduced them to the coyote. The coyote responded coyote-style by claiming them with his gesture of possession. One by one as they were presented he pissed on them slowly and deliberately: felt, walking stick, gloves, flashlight and Wall Street Journal, but above all the Wall Street Journal. The elements were arranged in the space. The two long lengths of felt were placed in the middle, one drawn into a heap with the flashlight shining out of it. And at the front of the space, by the barrier, were two neat piles of Wall Street Jour nals, fifty a day, and the edition of each changing day. The man had also brought a repertoire of Movements with him and a notion of time. These two were then subject to the coyote's responses, and were modulated and conditioned by them. The man never took his eyes off the animal. The line of sight between them became like the hands of a spiritual clockface measuring the timing of movements and setting the pace for the dialogue through time. The man carried out his sequence of Movements, a choreography directed towards the coyote, the timing and the mood regulated by the animal. Generally the sequence lasted about an hour and a quarter, sometimes much longer. In all it was repeated well over thirty times, but the mood and the tone were never the same. The man walked towards one length of felt with a brown walking stick over his arm, and pulled on the brown gloves. Then he swathed himself in the felt, easing it up over his hat until nothing but the raised stick, its curving end stretched upward, emerged above the grey tent. The image was an hieratic one, upright and 135

distant, the clear outline of a tall shepherd figure glimpsed across the distances of the steppes. The gaunt outline of felt and stick was a sculptural image too, and like a sculpture it was taken through successive forms and stages: vertical, crook directed upwards; bent at a right angle, crook to the ground; crouching upright as if for a long wait, then crouching again with the stick inclined to the floor. AII the time the figure shifted slightly on its axis, following the direction and movements of the coyote. Then the calm silence and the slow passage of time were abruptly broken. The figure fell sideways to the ground, transformed into a prone body wrapped in felt, a reminder of another event in the life of the man, a vulnerable object... The coyote's usual dozing place was the other pile of felt. He would stretch out on it or curl up, eyes half-closed, relaxed or wary, and the strange blond fire of those eyes always shone in the same direction as the glowing flashlight. His back was never turned on the people watching from behind the barrier. Maybe he sensed that more danger could come from them than from the man in there with him, or maybe it was simply because he was a splendid showman. His routine and timing were never dull. Sometimes he took over the show completely, ranging up and down the space, stopping now and then to stare back at the staring visitors, suddenly turning on the mean look his audience might have been expecting. Now and then he would remember the windows and the world outside, and stare out in amazement at New York and the bustle of the street below. Then he would go to town on the Wall Street Jour nals, clawing at them, chewing them, dragging them across the space, pissing and shitting on them. And every so often, with uncanny wolf rhythm, he would circle back to his mute feltswathed companion. Suddenly the inert figure stretched out on the ground would spring up, casting off the felt as he did so, and striking three clear resounding notes on the triangle at his waist. The high sharp sound shattered the silence. Then the silence built up again over the next ten seconds to be blotted out again, this time by the reverberation of a twenty-second-long blast of noise the roar of turbine machines projected from a taperecorder beyond the bar rier. The chaotic sound ended as abruptly as it had begun, and as it did so the man relaxed, took off his brown gloves, and threw them to the coyote to toss around. Then he walked across to rearrange the mauled and scattered Wall Street Journals into two neat piles again, and came up front to chat with a friend through the barrier and to down a glass of shocking-pink five-fruits-flavour Hawaiian Punch. Then back to the far corner for a quiet smoke in the covyote's straw. Oddly enough, or surely enough, this was the only time the coyote took any notice of the straw. Usually he preferred the felt. But when

the man was in the corner he joined him, and that interlude always had the atmosphere of a farmyard: long moments of faraway filtered sunlight. By and by the man got up, sorted out the piles of 136

felt, drew the long grey length up over his head, and the sequence started again. But there is also a very illuminating discussion of this event by the late Bernard Lamarche-Vadel, a French writer and art critic. The following is an extract: “The being who leaves the city or returns thereto, the being that abstracts himself from society or returns to become part of it, is a being who is ill and weak, a being for whom hospital transportation is required. Culture and technology produce an invalid; and wrapped in felt Beuys might be compared to the living dead. But this isolation is also the means towards a sort of active regression, in that it allows the artist to reconquer his own nature. The comparison between the artist and the coyote—and their reciprocal domestication of each other—symbolizes the reconciliation of nature and culture. The nomad carnivore that lives in the desert is a figure with whom the artist can identify; the copies of the Wall Street Journal refer to the general area of that which is quantifiable and reputable, that to which a name can be put. It stands in contraposition to unique lived experience, to the purely qualitative nature of this encounter. Finally, this encounter between artist and coyote reveals Beuys's desire to make manifest, to re-activate, the origin of the point at which he finds himself. A totemic animal for the Native Americans is here juxtaposed with the white man; their progressive interaction symbolizes a transcultural vision of America. At the same time, it inverts history: there is now a spectacular fraternization between white man and Native American, between man and animal.

The seal on this pact of solidarity is embodied in a Scottish mur derer (a member of the race that conquered America), who erects a statue to the glory of the man whose confinement within his own enclosed space has erased the divorce between humankind and nature, between the social and asocial, between the settled and the

following pages Joseph Beuys, first discussion: /ncontro con Beuys, curated by Caroline Tisdall, October 3, 1974, Pescara, Via delle Caserme 44 Heart I, June 1974, Basel, Kunstmuseum

nomadic, between ‘white man' and ‘redskin‘ This reconciliation between conflicting orders is also a moment of general creativity. Just like the prisoner in Scotland, each person is—through this reconciliation—brought more closely in touch with the means of creation at his/her disposal. But let's also hear from Jimmy Boyle, who would become the author of the best-seller A Sense of Freedom: “At the moment | hear much talk of taking art to the whole of society, but | also experience tremendous confusion by artists on how to do this. The only worthwhile statement that has had any effect on me and others in my environment has been Joseph Beuys's dialogue with the Coyote. The others pass over the head of society and lose their impact, and the gist of the particular statement is lost. If art and the artist wishe to take the statement to the public then they must clarify what they are saying, otherwise the statement will make the public feel stupid because he cannot understand. This will cause the public to withdraw and further alienate art and society. 137

Ret

1"

ai

DIA

è

E, A; ito s0,tI i

alla

Pal

y

ce

ME

S|

gra

*

ni aa

v

Da

»LI MEL RE

SÙ

On October 3, 1974 my official collaboration with Beuys would begin, an ongoing relationship with his art that continues to this day. In Pescara the discussion Incontro con Beuys was held, under the chair manship of Caroline Tisdall, a person with deep knowledge and understanding of Beuys's thought and work. The entire discussion focused upon the political and economic problems relating to Direct Democracy and free creativity. Many art critics took part in the debate. On that occasion Beuys produced the sculpture Cairn (the Gaelic word for “tumulus”). The work was made of reinforced concrete pre-prepared on the Durini agricultural estate; Beuys had the entire block brought to light, then cut into it and intervened using the written word. Like 1973, the year 1975 was not one of particularly intense activity; in January Beuys made a visit to Africa, where he became seriously ill. One work that should be mentioned is that entitled Hearth-Foyers, exhibited at the Ronald Feldman Gallery in New York and then at the Basel Kunstmuseum. In February 1976 Beuys was back in action, with one of his most atmospheric and dramatic environmental installations: Zeige deine Wende (Show your Wound), which was not without autobiographical content; the theme of physical suffering and the accompanying pain are themes we have already seen in his work. The installation was set up in the pedestrian subway between Maximilianstrasse and Altstadtring in Munich—a place of palpable desolation, with the atmosphere of a mortuary. A series of paired objects were laid out at intervals around the perimeter of the space; this doubling created the illusion of seeing a thing and its reflection, almost cancelling out the physical presence of the objects as such. There were two large forks, two bundles of the political newspaper Lotta Continua (painted brown and framed), two blackboards bear ing the words that give the installation its name, two anatomical ilustrations. Similar to those that are used in path labs, these latter were placed by drainage openings and were set above two glass bottles covered with a filter; alongside were two tins filled with animal fat (corporeal residues) and a thtermometer. Here, half-hidden, was the only object in the installation that was not in duplicate: the skull of a thrush set at the top of a test-tube. On the walls, above the two anatomical plates, there hung two tins in zinc laminate covered with shiny animal fat—like two spirits overseeing the physical decomposition that was taking place beneath them. The summer of that year Beuys was at the Venice Biennale with one of his most famous works, 7ram Stop, on the scientific/geological aspects of which Buby Durini had collaborated. Careful research was carried out on the Veneto coast, using the data from the drilling by the AGIP oil company. This produced a single work, Acque dolci, with the photographs from which Beuys produced Tram Stop itself, one of his most noted Italian graphic works (see the book /ncontro con Beuys). Caroline Tisdall produced the press release for the environmenty/in-

stallation that Beuys had created in the German pavilion. The follow ing are extracts: “The elements of 7ram Stop. There are three main 142

elements in Tram Stop, all made of iron, and describing three main directions that relate to air, earth and water. The monument itself rises vertically from the ground. Round the upright barrel of a field cannon are clustered four primitive 17thcentury mortar bombs, their tops, like the cannon barrel, cast and transformed in proportion and surface from the original monument in Cleves. Above the cannon, emerging from it, is the head of a man, modelled by Beuys in 1961 with Tram Stop in mind. His ex pression is pained, yet at the same time as elusive as his character: part Celt, part martial Roman, part ordinary worker, somehow archaic, heroic and yet not at all, both active and passive. Past the monument runs a tramline, a horizontal element along the earth's surface that bends slightly and curves gently, coming up from below the surface and running down into it again. If it were extended, this curve would reach far into the Venetian lagoon, and then on to describe a circle. As it is, the centre of its curve corresponds to one of the radial points of the monument. On another radial axis is a bored hole, sunk down to the water of the lagoon below, and then on, 25 metres deep in all, so that it becomes an iron tube full of cold water. lt makes a topographical link between the geological relationship of land above and water below in Beuys's native Cleves, on the Dutch border, and the lagoons of Venice. Running down the length of the bore hole is an iron bar, bent horizontally at the surface, then vertically upwards: a schematic echo of the three main directions in 7ram Stop. Close by lies the heap of rubble extracted when the hole was sunk. “Autobiography: Childhood and Cleves” This is not so much a recollection of childhood as the carrying out of a childhood intuition. As a five-year-old, Beuys would get on and off the tram at this point, and cross over to sit on one of the low iron shapes beneath the column. He did not know what they were, but their mystery told him they could only be something good. The forms interested him, not the details, and he probably never noticed that the mouth of the cannon was a dragon's jaw. Local lore, passed on through oral tradition, had it that the monument was something to do with someone's folly... an Iron Man... some cult. What attracted the child was an intuition of history and time, and the presence of something that nobody noticed. The relationship of the monument to the tramline passing by was something that only a child could grasp. Then there was the sense that both monument and tramline belonged to the same element: iron. Yet one was rough, rusting and immobile, the other gleaming smooth, skating over the earth and sparkling as the trams skated over it.’ And at Christmas Beuys and his family were guests at Villa Durini. In 1975 Beuys was on the Durini estate in Abruzzo producing his first Biological Plowing. Thus began his work in the earth and for the earth. I would like to recall some purely private memories involving ourselves and the Beuys family. At Easter (1977), Buby and myself were invited to spend the week at Beuys's farmhouse at Veert in 143

sue

Tram Stop, Venice Biennale 1976 Christmas 1975, Beuys and Lucrezia De Domizio with typical zampogna players from Abruzzo at Villa Durini, San Silvestro Colli, Pescara

following pages Joseph Beuys working at Biological Plowing in Baron Durini's estate, San Silvestro Colli, Pescara 1975 Biological Plowing, Baron Durini's estate, San Silvestro Colli, Pescara 1975

Holland, some 90 km from Dusseldorf. In this splendid place set in the middle of magnificent countryside, Beuys worked the earth, nurturing his plants and also preparing delicious meals; cooking was a passion of his, and at home in Dusseldorf he often worked on the preparation of meals while discussing his work with guests. On his land he had an organic vegetable garden; he also had a septic tank and careful separated his refuse for recycling. The simple gardening tools were kept in perfect order and Beuys was very diligent about turning the soil and nurturing the plants with fertilizers. In a small shed was the famous rabbit (Who says that...?) which he had brought with him from Abruzzo; the shed also served as stables for the three ponies which during the day wandered free around the fields. Beuys's two children—Jessyka and Wenzel—also had a small metal-hulled boat that they could row on the small mere that marked the boundary of his property. His wife, Eva—a very learned woman and a recognized scholar of Leonardo da Vinci—vwas the one who was responsible for the domestic dulie ...

Nostalgic Memories, with that far time now captured solely in the Buby's photographs. In 1977 Beuys was engaged on two important projects. The first, in the summer,

involved

his participation

in Documenta

VI in Kas-

sel, where he exhibited the atmospheric work Honig Pompe (The Honey Pump) and The 100 Days of FI.U. (The Free International University for Creativity and Interdisciplinary Research). 145

This is how Beuys himself described his work at Documenta VI.

Beuys: With “Honey pump” | am expressing the principle of the Free International University working in the bloodstream of society Flowing in and out of the heart organ—the steel honey container— are the main arteries through which the honey is pumped out of the engine room with a pulsing sound, circulates round the Free University area, and returns to the heart. The whole thing is only complete with people in the space round which the honey artery flows and where the bee's head is to be found in the coiled loops of tubing with its two iron feelers. Will power in the chaotic energy of the double engine churning the heap of fat. Feeling in the heart and bloodstream of honey flowing throughout the whole. Thinking powers in the Eurasian staff the head of which rises from the engine room right up to the skylight of the museum and then points down again. so the installation formed a whole with the 700 Days of the FI. (. during which hundreds of supporters of the FI.U. from all over the 150

this page and following pages Easter 1976, Joseph Beuys in his farm at Weert, Holland

world proposed activities in which the visitors to Documenta could take an active part. Trade unionists, lawyers, economists, politicians, journalists, social workers, educationalists and sociologists worked together on workshop activities with actors, musicians and young artists. It should be pointed out that of the artists exhibiting at Documenta VI, only three were willing to take part in the FI.U. meetings: Nam June Paik, John Latham and Arnulf Rainer. Beuys saw these encounters as an organic continuation of the work of art; the aim was to question the unilateral relationship between artists and public, suggesting an alternative to the frighteningly marginal and isolated position of culture within society. The discussions were predicated on the schema that was usual for Beuysian events: blackboards, diagrams, microphones, press releases and recordings. Beuys was a constantly active presence. In a small notebook he jotted down the salient points that arose during the 100 days of the “Permanent Conference” and from these notes produced the work Words which can Hear. In 1978, during a visit to Abruzzo, he installed this work in my house. Just for the record: the honey pump involved the use of 100 kg of margarine, two tons of honey and two boat engines. Another spectacular installation created in 1977 was Tallow, which involved an even more amazing quantity of organic material: 20 tons of animal fat. This culturally important installation was part of an open-air sculpture exhibition that had been organized by the City of Munster. Previously Beuys had never taken part in such open-air exhibitions, believing that Nature requires no adornment—and that the follies of building speculation should not be disguised (and thus glossed over). Usually on such occasions artists select for their work a site that will distract as little as possible from its aesthetic impact; reality must not interfere with the contemplation of art. Beuys, on the other hand, chose the worst possible place: a subway that led to the new auditorium of Munster University. Here, Beuys had noticed that the stairs formed a deeply-recessed wedge-like space that over time would gradually become filled with dust and dirt. So, he had a mould cast of the space and used this to model his huge sculpture in animal fat. The place chosen for the installation of the work thus “confirmed” the idea that inspired it. The titanic undertaking was carried out inside a cement factory outside Munster. First, 20 tons of sheep fat—mixed with some drums of beef fat (for greater solidityy—were melted on open flames. Then, drum after drum, the melted substance was poured into a mould made of reinforced plywood strengthened with wooden braces, the whole standing about five metres high. The sculpture took three months to become entirely solid. Then the huge wedge-like shape was cut into five pieces and transported to the site for installation. On February 12, 1978 Beuys was back in Pescara, at the Borsa Merci (Exchange Building), where he chaired a debate entitled Foundation for the Rebirth of Agriculture. Those taking part included: Vitantonio Russo (the artist-economist with whom Beuys would repeatedly 151

i

i pos

UO It

rst tte:

33

ad ,

Lapsegdiortetoateertà A NIUE LA

E Pa OC

LLI

z

EE

e

SENI

Interior of Fridericiamum Museum, Headquarter of FI.U., Documenta VI, Kassel 1977

this page and following page Detail of Honey pump, Interior of Fridericiamum Museum, Documenta VI, Kassel 1977

discuss matters relating to the environment and the economics of agriculture), Enrico Wolleb and Dimitri L. Coramilas, as well as numerous other intellectuals and critics and all the major figures of Arte Povera (Alighiero Boetti, Luciano Fabro, Mario and Marisa Merz) and Italian Conceptualism (Gino De Dominicis, Vettor Pisani, Emilio Prini), plus such emerging young artists as Marco Bagnoli, Sandro Chia, Francesco Clemente, Luigi Ontani, Remo Salvadori and Ettore Spalletti. This was the occasion for Beuys's first presentation in Italy of the Free International University—of which he made me Italian Chancellor. At the same time he presented the document Azione Terza Via - Iniziativa promozionale. Idea e tentativo pratico per realizzare una alternativa ai sistemi sociali esistenti nell’Occidente e nell’Oriente, the famous “red book" for whose diffusion in other languages he gave me the copyright; that book has not only been published in Italian but also in Japanese, Spanish and English (the full discussion of this matter appears in the

Fifth Station). Beuys: Here in Pescara, with the Free International University and all those people who are connected to this initiative, we wanted to open an ‘Institute for the Rebirth of Agriculture‘: an act of foundation which in practice is celebrated in this very moment. A founding act which goes to join existing experiences of work collectives to be DS

found in Germany, Scotland, Ireland and Holland and which for the global interest here, in this geographical and historical place (Pescara), implements the idea of creating this Institute for the Rebirth of Agriculture. In order to achieve this aim it has been necessary to convey this somewhat schematic idea with regards to how the economy can be developed according to criteria and ways which are completely different. lt is necessary for people, especially those engaged in agriculture, to have a prospect, a hope, because it is an absurdity that in order to satisfy their own vital needs they have to emigrate and leave their land for a slightly higher wage. To better evidence this it is sufficient to break with everything which is taking place at present on a political level ... It is a well-known fact that to manipulate human energies in the main means dealing with psichic energies (in education, for example) and that this act faithfully follows the technique of the manipulation of external energies (electricity, for example). However, we also know that all of this starts out from concepts which for a long time now have basically shown themselves to be in disagreement. So with regards to agriculture, let us now see how a materialistic and scientific thought works, such as that of the present-day political system with its one-dimensional organization. This thought imagines what takes place in agriculture and in the plant as being something which is purely mechanical ... Instead of this concept which today holds sway in agriculture, aimed at exploitation on the basis of an explosive and mechanistic principle, we have to arrive at an implosive principle which considers all energies, also those surrounding the plant in its cosmic extension. Only then will it become possible to inaugurate a technological age which really works on behalf of mankind. Basically speaking, the question of agriculture appears like a religious question because as soon as we broaden our Sight and also look at the mankind's invisible aims and goals, then we also glimpse the invisible ends of the plant, its being put within an entire universe which envelops it on a cosmic level. Only then will mankind see that this is its only system of alimentation. Only then will it realize that fertilizer, in the final analysis, depends on the stars and consequently on an immaterial grandness. The age of a chemical agriculture, with the sole effect of poisoning the Earth, must come to an end, so that something can be born which allows people to live and which does not oblige them to die.

following pages Second discussion for Beuys: Fondazione per la Rinascita dell'Agricoltura, Borsa Merci, Pescara, February 12, 1978

Shortly afterwards, in an exhibition at the Basel Kunstmuseum, Beuys presented the environment/installation Hearth 'Hhe second version for a work initially created in 1974. It was on this occasion that I remember noting his close working relationship with—and great esteem for—the famous American gallery-owner Ronald Feldman.

Beuys: Permanent conference is the idea of Hearth. In this sense each copper rod represents a personality with its own opinion, each 157

with its own contribution to make. Unity in Diversity. Groupings are expressed through arrangement of the rods into prime numbers, 1 235711, and the group number is engraved at the top of each rod. My own contributions to this conference are declared in Hearth |. A wooden cart like the one | plaved with as a child carries a dismantled copper Eurasian staff and all the ideas it represents. Everyone drags some personal load behind them, both positive and negative, and it must be some deep memory of this that makes small children such obsessive cart-draggers. Then there is the felt-insulated copper rod: “Fight for freedom with the warm walking stick!" On December 23, 1978 the Frankfurt Rundschau published Aufruf zur Alternative (Call for the Alternative), an interesting initiative that was part of the organic transformation of Beuys's art. Beuys would then place the Call for the Alternative in the Italian section of my Annuario del Clavicembalo for 1979. On July 7 1979 Beuys and Nam June Paik held a Concert at the Dusseldorf Academy to commemorate their old Fluxus companion, George Maciunas, who had died around this time. The gallery-owner René Block, who had long worked with the artist, decided to close his Berlin gallery with a Beuys exhibition entitled Ja, jetzt brechen zir hier den Scheiss ab (Yes, now we really will free ourselves of everything). The exhibition involved an aktion in which Beuys used a spade to demolish the entire space of the gallery. The following year the rubble, packed in special containers, was shipped to New York, where—combined with components of the 1974 Coyote—it was used by the artist for an exhibition at Ronald Feldman's gallery entitled Neues von Coyoten (News about Coyote). The ex hibition opened on the same morning as the great retrospective show at the Guggenheim Museum in New York. 1979 was a very important year for Beuys, who in October was invited to exhibit at the 15th Sao Paulo Biennial in Brazil. In December he was the leading figure of a Monumental Retrospective Ex hibition at the Guggenheim Museum in New York, with numerous works loaned from the Darmstadt collection and from all over the world. Beuys also chose to include the showcase work /ncontro con Beuys that was part of my private collection. Responding to an explicit request from Beuys, Buby Durini spent twenty-five days photographing both the public and private aspects of the great retrospective exhibition. From the over three thousand photographs he took, Beuys created two different regal and unique works—Guggenheim Museum—which have earned their place in the history of art. Depicting characters and places involved in his famous aktionen, the images chosen by Beuys were presented on emulsified canvas according to a layout devised by the artist himself. In the lower centre Beuys pasted a photograph of the First World War in Russia, framing it in pencil outline and then signing the whole work. 160

The Harpsichord. Defence of Nature, Beuys watching Abruzzo's mountains from Villa Durini,

San Silvestro Colli, 1976-1979 following pages Workers at Beuys's Paradise Plantation, Bolognano 1980

Reflections upon space and time, upon the diversity of artistic languages, upon collaboration and creativitr—these two works embody what are prime concepts for the whole of Beuys's art and thought: Reappropriation and Creative Freedom. The two unique works were part for my collection up to 2002, when they were given on loan to the Zurich Kunsthaus; they are now in the Palazzo Durini in Bolognano. Given that creative development and evolution plays such part in Beuys's thought, it was difficult for him to accept the notion of a "retrospective” as proposed by the Guggenheim: it seemed to imply a sort of celebration of things past, of an activity concluded. To Beuys, it all seemed rather like a funeral. He would, in fact, make such comments with regard to that occasion in two different interviews: one given before the exhibition, the other after it

(in 1980). Bernard Lamache-Vadel: ... You are preparing a retrospective exhibition at the Guggenheim Museum in New York. Joseph Beuys: But it doesn't interest me. B.L.V.: So, what is your relation to this exhibition? J.B.: As always, there is the traditional need for cultural “functions.” I am beginning to think about the importance and non-importance of holding exhibitions; | do them less and less. | turned down the Guggenheim twice; but it seems that now there is real interest in what | am doing, and in discussion. So | said yes. But | have always adopted a technique aimed at developing things, starting from old structures; because a new thing can only arise from an old body. So it seems normal to me. But it is still true that it [the exhibition] is a very boring task."

The other interview was one given to Pierre Restany, a friend, critic and very perceptive admirer of the German artist's work. Pierre Restany: Perhaps you could say something about your show at the Guggenheim Museum? Joseph Beuys: On that occasion it was like seeing another artist's show. | thought: “He was a very important man in those times and, nevertheless, he made very important things." But on that day | was not prepared to see all his things again. So | had, in a way, a kind of aversion—all that in the morning. And | had an ache in the pit of my stomach. So then | went to this opening there and there was a tremendous lot of people; then somebody brought me a long speech. | was standing in the midst of the people and I felt bad; | intended to vomit and so | went out. | saw Kasper Koenig and | said to him ‘Can you perhaps give me a cigarette?’ So he tried to give me a cigarette, but | did not see it—| just passed out.

Contemporary with the Guggenheim exhibition was the publication of the book Joseph Beuys by Caroline Tisdall. This, together with Adriani, Kennertz and Thomas's Joseph Beuys, Life and Works (published for the Sao Paulo Biennial), remains one of the most complete and precise works on the artist. 1979 would also see 166

previous pages

and facing page Two unique works, Guggenheim Museum New York, 1979, Lucrezia De Domizio Durini private collection Happening

at Palazzo Durini, May 12, 1984. Beuys working on Incontro con Beuys

the conclusion of the Grassello-Pescara Dusseldorf Pescara “operation” which had begun the year before. This complex work is documented in a publication containing photographs taken by Buby Durini.The entire work is now in the MART, Rovereto (this theme is dealt with in the Fifth Station). On April 1980 Beuys was again in Italy; at the Rocca Paolina in Perugia. Here an important debate took place between Beuys and Burri, organized by the art critic Italo Tomassoni, who published an impor tant catalogue for the occasion. In summer 1980 Harald Szeemann, a highly influential independent curator and a man with deep knowledge of and enthusiasm for Beuys's work and ideas, invited the artist to exhibit at the Venice Biennale; Beuys showed Das Kapital, of which he would say: Beuys: But let us start with this Venice piece: here | think | followed exactly the theme of that exposition. This exhibition was dedicated to that time—so | followed that period and thought about which principle in it. from the age of seventeen until now, was for me the most important action or general impulse in my art activity. So then | decided to show the history of the lecture actions where the principles, the structures and the ideas of organizations and a wider understanding of art being related to the social problems, could appear as a kind of documentation. So | showed the tools, the instruments and the blackboards as a kind of documentation of such a wider understanding of art as being related to such fields, such powerfields of the social order. This is the most important principle: the money problem in society, capital. And so | called this historical piece “Capital.” In August of that same year Beuys was in London, exhibiting the environmental work Stripes from the House of the Shaman at the Anthony D'Offay Gallery. 1980 was also the year in which he exhibited his Before Departure from Camp | at the Kunstverein in Bonn. The objects used in the installation had originally been the furnishing of the old office of the Organization for Direct Democracy, all painted a rust colour.

Beuys: This was Camp I. So, with regard to Camp | one could say that nowadays we are more or less in Camp VIII. In fact, after that, Important steps were made, and this is how one should read the title, in a completely real sense: we are in the situation of those about to depart; we will scale the peaks and overcome all the difficulties that are at present before us. With regard to this year, it is also important to underline the support vvhich Beuys's work received from certain dedicated friends. When, following its partial sale to the city of Frankfurt, the Stròher Collection in Darmstadt was about to be broken up, a group of friends stepped in to buy the whole collection and install it in the Darmstadt Landesmuseum. 172

previous pages Joseph Beuys and Andy Warhol on the occasion of Beuys's survey exhibition at the Guggenheim New York, December 1979 Beuys and Lucrezia De Domizio in the Praslin home, Coquille Blanche.

Diary of Seychelles operation, L'Innaffiatoio, December 1980

facing page Joseph Beuys at Valle de Mai, Praslin. Diary of Seychelles operation, December 1980 following pages Joseph Beuys at La Digue island. Diary of Seychelles operation,

December 1980

eni tg

$

BIT

Di; E sh 7)|

At Christmas 1980 Beuys and his family were invited to my home at Praslin in the Seychelles. Beuys had long wanted to explore a place which in his discussions with me he described as a natural habitat, a great stimulus for creative work. The natural beauty of the place made a great impression upon him, and in the time of his stay there Beuys—the man and the artist—seemed to become absorbed by the natural habitat, without any barriers or restrictions.

In the same way, he engaged even more totally with the realm of his own creativity, creating his First Plantation. This distant place saw the creation of unique works that bear witness to the whole Defence of Nature operation and to Beuys's exceptional art. For a more detailed discussion, see the Fifth Station. On May 12, 1981 Beuys celebrated his 60th birthday, and his friend Heinrich Béli dedicated a poem to him, warning against “the cold glacier of fame”

previous pages Joseph Beuys at the Victoria-Mahe market

Diary of Seychelles operation, January 1981 Joseph Beuys at Coquille Blanche, Praslin, guest at the Durinis' villa,

planting Coco de Mer and Coconut, the first Master's plantation, Diary of Seychelles operation, December 1980, 3,00 pm.

182

Lotta Continua. One can see the Red Book Third Way and the yearbook The Harpsichord, published by Lucrezia De Domizio. Rome, Palazzo Braschi, 1981

TO BEUYS ON HIS 60TH BIRTHDAY

In memoriam ofRudi Dutschke Be careful Beuys on the cold glacier of fame Unchallenged in the shifting chill sand might become honey

In the packaging of fame

even misery for them, supersaturated problems, become flavour and aroma; it may be that they swallow down themselves not you.

If you are what they think you cannot be what they are: bound to all the glaciers in murderous innocence.

Remember Beuys the oft crucified German; remember the German Rudi in a corner, or just here suffering cold and hunger; smile forgotten.

On him put your hat on him put your jacket to him give your honey Buy scarves, jacket and hat at the corner there Take with you your coyote of darkness; warm yourselves at the fire. Of eternal adoration in the cloister (I had an aunt in there; and didnt you?) I was always cold only warmed by the poetry of dissent. Be careful Beuys you are quite like that.

Joseph Beuys, 7000 Querce, publication

184

Documentatione della da Johannes Stittgen.

FREE

INTERNATIONAL

UNIVERSITY,

maggio

1982, composta

Kraus Wo

Photo:

In 1981 Beuys presented two important initiatives in Italy; both of them inspired by the earthquake that had devastated certain areas of the Campania region, they once again demonstrated the human generosity of the artist. The presentation of the first, entitled Earthquake, took place in Rome and was followed by a debate regarding solidarity with certain members of the radical left movement Lotta Continua. The central component was an old Linotype machine that had been used to print posters for the radical newspaper of the same name. In the central part of this were placed the famous document Call for the Alternative (taken from my Yearbook // Clavicembalo) and an Italian flag wrapped in felt; animal fat was placed on the keyboard. The back of the machine was surrounded by blackboards with diagrams by Beuys. Buby Durini photographed the entire event; as a document of our collaboration, Beuys issued a limited-issue publication (two hundred copies), all numbered and signed in red by the artist (See the “Multiples in Italy, in the Sixth Station). The second important environmental installation was created for the exhibition organized for the victims of the Naples earthquake by Lucio Amelio, with whom Beuys had collaborated in the early 19705. Before going to Naples the artist visited Bolognano and the night he was there was that of the terrible Avezzano earthguake, which also damaged Palazzo Durini. Ve spent the entire night amidst rubble. Earthquake in a Palazzo was exhibited for the first time in the Galleria Amelio in Naples, then—in 1984—at the Villa Campolieto at Ercolano. It consisted of four old pieces of furniture—rustic tables and chests— balanced on glass jars and resting against the wall, their edges pushing against the glass jars and terracotta vases. The whole generated a sense of instability, of imminent and inevitable disaster—-just like an earthquake. But this was also a metaphor for the disaster towards which the prevailing political and economic Models of capitalism and communism were leading humankind. In January 1982 Beuys would work on another environmental installation at the Galerie Durant-Dessert in Paris: Letzer Raum? Last Space?

(1964-1982). In that same city he would, again in 1982, have an interesting publie conversation with the Dalai Lama, in which he proposed that Tibet, invaded by Chinese Communists in 1950, should be declared an example of a community dedicated to the spiritual economy (for the documents, see the Fifth Station). But his most important activity that year was undoubtedly his participation in Documenta VII in Kassel, where he created his most amazing, most extraordinarv—and yet most simple—aktion, the echo of which was felt throughout the world. The title of the work was 7000 Oaks. However, it should be pointed out that Beuys's First Plantation actually dates from 1980, during his time at Praslin (this is discussed in the Fifth Station). The following text was written by Johannes Stùttgen, formerly Beuys's pupil, as documentation for the FI.U.: “To contribute to Documenta VII in 1982, the decision of the German sculptor and artist Joseph Beuys 186

L

LI

J. BEUY

Beuys arrives in Italy for the Difesa della Natura discussion. Rome, Fiumicino, May 10, 1984 following pages Beuys interviewed at Fiumicinio by a RAI Journalist. Young people from Italian FI.U. welcome him with the famous banner Difesa della Natura, Roma Fiumicino airport, May 10, 1984

for his part was the planting of 7000 cak trees in the township of Kassel. He has started his preliminary arrangements in spring 1982. Next to each tree a column of basalt of about 1.20 metres will be erected. AII columns will be transported from the quarry near Kassel down to the core of the town to Documenta Art-Center and stored there at the large field in front of the Fridericianum. In the very beginning already, the entire mass of stones, compared to the number of provided trees, expresses an image of the complete production. The imagination becomes perfect by comparing again the single constellation of the very first planted oak tree, accompanied by its column let into the soil, to the mountain of basalt blocks piled up opposite, on the border of Friedrichsplatz. While time goes by the proportion of the image will be modified on account of the three steps to come: I.The planting process will continue for several years in Kassel. The amount of stones will diminish related to the number of the trees. Always one stone will be moved out of the depot for each tree to be planted. Everybody is given the possibility to persecute the process: the more the lot of laid down stones decreases, the more the number of the planted tree increases. Il. Likewise a proportional displace occurs to the stones depot, rather gigantic in the beginning, compared with the small, slim and

young oak-tree opposite. The process will continue without inter ruption until the last column has been removed from the hoard and

187

nothing remains, but the first planted tree and the stone at its side, standing alone, like in the beginning before the action was set about. III. The cireumstances of the prototype-tree and all other examples realized, are subject to an alteration process whilst their growth proceeds: more precisely spoken, as far as width and height of the stone is concerned they are not exposed to any change actually, but they will diminish optically compared to the growth of the tree. In the end the casting point is the motive-power, which determines the permanence of the whole process. Movement and activity, entirely considered, point out instruction orders toward the New Age, bearing in mind already the many generations still to come. Beuys: As far as the first 7000 trees are concerned, it has been of great importance to me to obtain the monumental character, obviously indeed through the fact, that each single monumental is composed of the two parts, the living being, the oak-tree, steadily altering due to the season of the year and the other one, the crystalline part, preserving its shape, quantity, height and weight. The one and only possible incident, able to evoke a change to the stone could be, for instance, by taking away a piece from it or if something splinters off, but never by means of coming up, like the tree does. Once the two things are united, an always changing proportionality

Buby Durini and Beuys leave for Bolognano with the Auto F/.U., Rome, May 10, 1984

Comune di Bolognano sign

happens between the two parts of the monument. For the present we should keep in mind, that the above-mentioned trees do have an age of six or seven years now, therefore the stone rather dominates at first. However as years go by, the balance between the stone and the tree will be achieved and after a course of time about 20 or 30 years to come, perhaps we might notice and become aware of It, that the tone gradually and step by step becomes accessories to the evergreen oak or any other kind of tree. At Kassel Beuys created a small object of peace, which was based on a reproduction in gold of the Tsar's crowvn—a work that caused heated public debate in West Germany. In October 1982 Beuys was given the use of the courtyard at the Gropius-Bau in West Berlin. In this ample space enclosed by windows, he worked on one of his last great pieces: a beautiful environment/installation called Zeigerst. The objects and sculptures he created here were then used as models to be cast in bronze and aluminium for Lightning with Stag in its Glare, which was completed in October 1985. In this period Beuys was very interested in the nascent ecological movement,

which later would form the Green Party and win seats

in the German parliament in 1983. That same year would also see 191

a travelling exhibition of Beuys's drawings; curated by the artist's faithful friend, assistant and publisher, Heiner Bastian, this would visit various cities in Switzerland, France, Austria and Sweden. The most important work of 1983, however, was undoubtedly Das Ende des Jahrhunderts (The End of the Twentieth Century), an installation created in four different versions, varying according to location. The dominant feature however remained unchanged: a mound of stones whose shape vaguely recalls that of the basalt columns of Kassel. Within these stones a hole was drilled, to be filled with clay and felt. 1984 was a year of intense activity for Beuys. On May 12 he was back at Bolognano in Abruzzo for a discussion of the Defence of Nature Operation. This had begun two years earlier, but what exactly did it involve?

Beuys's Studio in the Paradise Plantation. Restoration of an old

farmhouse. Bolognano, 1980

Marcello Zaccagnini's wine cellar, 1984

Beuys: My friendship with Lucrezia is certainly important, but | would like to point out that, from the very beginning, our work together was always within the context of the FI.U. (Free International University). The goal of this university is to allow us to overcome the current political systems of both the Vest and the East through the rebirth of nature and of man as a sociological being. Our work consists of creating “models,” not practical results, and since in Kassel I am planting 7000 oaks, | decided to plant seven thousand trees, 193

The volumes /ncontro

con Beuys, 1984 and Difesa della Natura,

Fu |EL

1988

Beuys visiting his Paradise Plantation with Lucrezia De Domizio.

Bolognano, May 13, 1984

all of different species, here in Bolognano. | want to create in Bolognano a small paradise, study plants which are becoming extinct, and create, with the collaboration of Lucrezia and Buby Durini, an ecological bank in which plants will be protected and cared for. For this action will not be confined to Bolognano: | want to create a network of similar projects to spread to other places. On that occasion Beuys was made an honorary citizen of Bolognano thanks to the work of the head of the local cultural affairs department, Claudio Sarmento—a person whose passionate interest in Beuys's ideas was such that, when he became mayor, he created the famous Piazza Beuys. Many people contributed to the public discussion held to promote the Defence of Nature operation—for example, the artist Marco Bagnoli asked Beuys a memorable question. The art critic Italo Tomassoni, a man of special intellectual stature who had contributed to the writing of the publication, presented the volume /ncontro con Beuys. This was a project dear to Beuys's heart and charted the ten-year collaboration of myself and Buby Durini with the artist, both in Italy and abroad (see the Fifth Station). Here, | would like to say something of the story behind this book, which Beuys saw as setting the operation Defence of Nature within its historical context. | remember that we used to work for hours in his home in Dusseldorf; Beuys chose quiet odd photographs, in the sense that they were of little apparent aesthetic value. But that only served to highlight their conceptual content all the better. Initially | was perplexed by his choices, so | asked him: “Why are you discarding some of Buby's really fine photographs?” He answered: “This is not a book of photographs; people have to understand my work. When | am no longer here, you can put in the beautiful pictures taken by my friend Buby... The idea for the book dated back to 1982, with the precise intent of involving all those Italian critics who over the years had written about—or participated in—Beuys's events. Unfortunately, the entire project was kept on hold for two long years because of the conflicts between the various critics, each one of whom wanted to 194

following pages Joseph Beuys and Lucrezia De Domizio installing /ncontro con Beuys on the artist's birthday, May 12,1984. Bolognano, Palazzo Durini Beuys receives the Honorary Cityzenship in Bolognano, May 13, 1984

; ii

>

have control over the publication; Germano Celant even expected to be paid for his contribution. lt was Beuys who, thoroughly disapproving of the way things were going, in January 1984 decided that there would be only one critical contribution, from Italo Tomassoni, the sole person who had been ready and willing to offer his full and generous collaboration. Even getting the book published turned out to be a difficult task. | remember that numerous Italian publishers turned it down—including my then friend Umberto Alemandi. That was why, for the sole purpose of producing this book, | had to create the D.I.A.C. publishing house. Now, twenty-six years later, the whole thing seems like a dream to me—a dream that is also a reality. At the Venice Biennale that same summer, Beuys would—together with Cucchi, Fabro and Nauraan—participate in the exhibition entitled Quartetto, which was held in the Scuola Grande di San Giovanni Evangelista. Entitled /s it about a bicycle?, Beuys's piece looked back over the projects and aktionen of his entire career; the artist drew them on fifteen blackboards and then rode over them on a bicycle. Various students participated in producing the work. On this occasion, Bernard Lamarche-Vadel again intervieved the artist: B.L.V.: First of all, what does the title mean? J.B.: The title refers to the vehicle, and the action represents the history of the FI.U. 200

Beuys plants the First Italian Oak in memory of the Kassel 7000 Eichen in front of his Studio in the Paradise Plantation, May 13, 1984 Wall decoration at the Castello di Rivoli, December 1984

The FI.U. itself represents an action, in the sense of being an enrichment of the problematics posed by art. This organization reflects the second phase in the concept of direct democracy. Its aim is to study the meaning of and the problems posed by a new society. So, this organization is an open arena; Itis a Permanent Assembly in which the most diverse problems—such as creativity, spirituality, law, the ecological party, ete.—can be posed. This is the resultant position of art, formulating the bases for a new society through written texts—a theory that all can master and then discuss. This is the portrait of the FI.U., which | always envisaged as a vehicle. In the 1960s, during one of my Fluxus phases, | used the idea of “art-vehicle”—that is, a vehicle which is at the disposal of one and all and which can be used everywhere. In effect, a function. As for the representation itself. it traces out the history of the FI.U., and it is the result of thirty days of discussions during the last few Documenta. There were a lot of people, each day; and we proposed new themes for discussion. | have illustrated this in these pictures. There were a lot of people, and this is the result. B.L.V.: In the background of the pictures there is a night sky scattered with stars. ls that a deliberate effect? J.B.: Yes, that is a good question. The effect was produced by my final action upon these pictures. To give a certain unity to the whole, I laid the panels out as if forming a path and then rode across them on a bicycle. I had spread some white paint on the tyres, which was sprayed over the panels and thus formed this starstrewn sky. It is a result that was thought through; | even calculated the speed at which one would have to go to achieve this effect. B.L.V.: The colour of this representation is due to the memory of your work? J.B.: Usually | do not use colours. But, as | said, this time a lot of people participated in this action, using colour chalks—so | wanted to do so as well. VVe never posed the problem of the composition of colours. These are solely the colours of the chalks we used. B.L.V.: Your work develops like a sort of apprenticeship for a selfportrait. You no longer consider the face, however, but the head— as containing thoughts, emotions and intuitions. Would you accept that your work could be interpreted from this point of view as well? J.B.: Yes, / have nothing against it; | accept that point of view. But natu-

rally this is not a self-portrait of me as an individual. ls it about a bicycle? js a portrait of the FI.U. But as the FI.U. is the product of my own activity, one could say that it is a self-portrait. It is the portrait of a body of ideas which are mine, but which involve the participation of many different people. Amongst them | am solely the agent, the actor. One might say that my entire work is a self-portrait that brings together my ideas: the FI.U., the enrichment of art, direct democracy, the freedom of science, the new economic order that rejects the State as it is and all forms of State that exist at the present. 202

Work in progress on the stone parallelepiped for Olivestone. Top right the FIAC stand, Paris, October 1984

B.L.V: /s it about a bicycle? perhaps represents for you that which the Boîte-en-valise represented for Duchamp? J.B.: Perhaps Marcel Duchamp was interested in vehicle-art because he conceived this object, which incorporates a bicycle wheel that turns upon itself. It is a good image of the work of Duchamp— of a man who continually finds himselfat the same point, with the same style and the same approach. However, in my work the bicycle refers to problems that are different from each other: problems of the Third World, of the structure of society, of democracy and economics. This bicycle is not a “support”; its wheels do not return to the same point, do not turn desperately about nothing. It is a bicycle that moves, advancing towards the future. There are a lot of interesting things in Duchamp valise; but they are things you cannot work with when faced with a problem of pedagogy, a problem relating to economic or democracy.

Beuys working on Ombelico di Venere, June 1985

Then the va-

lise /tself is of no use. In ls it about a bicycle? there are components with which one can work; there is a methodology that everyone can understand and discuss. In Duchamp there is nothing to discuss, nothing to criticize. You have to take the work as it is, as an art object that has to be set in a museum. My pictures, on the other hand, are material for discussion.

De dim T

In December 1984 Beuys was back in Italy, this time at Castello di Rivoli (Turin) for the installation of the work Olivestone—the prototype for which had been presented at my stand within the Paris FIAC that same year (along with various related multiples created by Beuys). The entire work consists of five ancient stone vats which had long been used on the Durini estates in the production of olive oil. The same type of sandstone—from Lettomanoppello, a small town in Abruzzo—was used to create “lids” for these rectangular vats, with a small gap of a few millimetres between rim and lid. Each vat was then filled with around 800 litres of oil, which came right up to the rim and formed a thin shiny surface over the lid that reflected the decorated walls of the 18th-century Castello... | will discuss later (Fifth Station) the sad story of this work which, donated by myself, has been in the Zurich Kunsthaus since 1992. Beuys returned to Bolognano in spring 1985, creating his very last piece: Venus Navel - Cotyledon Ombelicus Veneris, which was made up of fourteen different works. Amongst the rocks of Castello Durini he had that spring found a number of Mediterranean plants that are known as “ombelico di Venere” (Venus's Navel) because of the strange shape created where their centre gathers around the stem. Beuys laid out a certain number of these plants on blottingpaper sheets of various sizes, then passed them through a rudimen-

tary press. The process marked a sort of transubstantiation of the natural into the bio-physical. In September Beuys carefully chose fourteen of the dried plants and laid them out between two sheets of glass within a white lacunar frame. The fourteen works—together with the press and a banner bearing the name of the piece—were exhibited at the Paris FIAC. Each year Beuys produced a special work for this event—including Auto F/U (now in the Guggenheim Museum, New York), Posts, FIU Wine, Spade and Olivestone. In 1985 Beuys was involved in two exhibitions in London. For the first he produced the environment/installation entitled Plight. A room of the Anthony d'Offay Gallery was completely covered with enormous rolls of felt, placed one upon the other to form unlikely padded columns. In the middle of the room was a grand piano on which were placed a blackboard and a thermometer. The other exhibition was that held at the Royal Academy of Arts 206

Working press.

Ombelico di Venere operation, 1985.

Donated by Kunsthaus Zurich 1995 following pages Joseph Beuys in Naples, 1972

dedicated to 20th-century German art. Beuys's contribution was perhaps one of the most emblematic works of German art produced since the end of the Second World War. Entitled Lightning, this was taken from the larger environmental composition Lightning with Stag in its Glare. More than six metres in length, the enormous mass of bronze and iron hung from a bracket in the ceiling. Its literally Impending mass seemed to overwhelm and suffocate the bronze sculptures beneath: Boothia, Felix, Goat and Primordial Animals. Alongside these was another sculpture—or, perhaps, one should call ita "being": Stag, entirely made of shiny aluminium. A primary figure in the Beuysian mythology, the stag can be traced back to his childhood drawings, when it was often seen as a “guide” In this work, the animal shines, a luminous presence in spite of the spectral mass of the Lightning that threatens to smash into the earth. On December 23, 1985 Beuys's lastshow—Palazzo Regale—opened at the Museo Capodimonte in Naples. This last environmenty/installation consisted of two showcases in gilded brass with various remnants of previous aktionen and other souvenir objects. Alongside these, the walls were hung with seven brass “blackboards” bearing drawings in gold leaf. The following January 12 Beuys was awarded the Wilhelm Lehmbruck Award by the city of Duisburg, where he gave what one must consider as his last public speech. In spite of the debilitating disease that had by then deprived him of all his strength, Beuys uttered words that were vibrant with love and feeling, capturing the deep meaning of his entire oeuvre. His speech was one of thanks to Wilhelm Lehmbruck himself. Beuys: / would like to thank the master artist Wilhelm Lehmbruck. How could a man—by the simple fact that | had seen a small por tion of his work in photographic reproductions—stir within me the fixed resolution to dedicate myself to sculpture? How could someone who was already dead drive me to make a choice that was so decisive for my life, when—as one can see from the fact that | had begun my course of study in the natural sciences—| myself had already chosen to dedicate myself to something different? | can give a brief explanation. One day | found myself holding a publication which, along with a number of rather dog-eared books, | had discovered on a table. | opened it and saw a picture of a Lehmbruck sculpture. Immediately I had an idea, or rather an intuition: Sculpture—with sculpture one could do something! Everything is sculpture—that is what that image seemed to shout

at me. It was then that | saw a flame, a light, and | heard a voice which said: Protect the flame! This event was with me throughout the war—and after the end of the conflict, it drove me to dedicate myself to sculpture. Thus, without even knowing exactly what was entailed, | started the study of art. First of all, |got an idea of what there was to be done, given that 207

CP

RARE

=

Sr

È

;

o

pe$

I had not had the slightest idea. I should perhaps add something else here, which itself is part of the prehistory of the event that was to be so important for me. | was born in the Lower Rhineland and, at the time of my youth, during the Third Reich, we were constantly surrounded by a forest of sculpture; but it was sculpture done in a way that did not stir the slightest interest in me. VVhen later, during my studies, | tried to get to the very heart of the subject, | often wonderedì: If instead of a work by Wilhelm Lehmbruck | had come across a Hans Arp, for example, or a Picasso or a Giacometti, or even a Rodin, would they have been able to arouse in me such an immediate impulsive reaction? Even now | would have to say No, because Lehmbruck's exceptional art verges upon a limit case in the conception of plastic form ... When | had begun my studies, and was already following my path, my efforts were dedicated to the achievement of a totally new theory for the future of plastic figuration—problems related to thinking and feeling, to the meaning that they are supposed to have. VVhen | thought of a plastic figuration | did not think solely of the physical material with which it was to be created, but also of that complex of spiritual components that form its substratum. lt was this which made it impossible for me to resist the move towards the social aspects of plastic form. And | have still not exhausted that which | take to be the message that Lehmbruck communicated to me. One day, on a dusty shelf of books, | found the much discussed— and fiercely opposed—appeal which, in 1919, Rudolf Steiner addressed to the German people and to all the civilized nations of the world, aiming for a reformation of social structures upon a totally new basis. After the experience of the war, which had been very tough for Lehmbruck, here was someone who could see that the causes of the recently-ended conflict lay in the impotence afflicting the world of the spirit. In this appeal for the re-foundation of society, for the creation of a new social organism, | found Wilhelm Lehmbrucks name amongst those of the members of the proposing committee. He was one of those who had offered to work for the effective achievement of this end... And this is the tragic aspect of it all: amongst the names of those who declared themselves ready to found the various sections in Germany, Austria and Switzerland, | saw that—in the list for Germany-—Lehmbruck's name was followed by a cross. This means that he must, at the very end of his life, have felt the need to leave this final message, urging those who came after him to carry the flame forward. lt must have been practically the last act of his life. You know how these things go, when collecting signatures for an appeal. You quickly gather together the names of the committee members and then you hurriedly circulate them. lt must have been in the very short space of time between the collection of the signatures and the publication of the list that Wilhelm Lehmbruck put an end to his life. So, | took this to be the second symbol. Finally, on the cover of that publication | saw the urgent and imploring image of a torch being handed on—the gesture expressed with an intensity of 210

Work in progress on the stone parallelepiped for Olivestone. September 1984

meaning that one must still try to communicate to others. Because it was—and is—something that many people have to see: the basic requirement for that renovation of social structures which will lead to a social sculpture ... Well, | would like to make it clear today that | am on the same side as that on which Wilhelm Lehmbruck lived and died; the side from which he launched to each and everyone of us, his final message: Protect the flame. Because if we do not protect it, the wind will put It out before we even know it—the very same wind that first lit it. And then, poor, poor, heart, it will all be over for you, petrified within yOUr sorrow. I do not want to take anything away from the work of Wilhelm Lehmbruck.

A few days after making that speech, Beuys died in his Dusseldorf home, on January 23, 1986. His final speech—like his entire life— had been a very special gesture of love.

What I am striving to do is to reveal a vision ofthe future in which we are sure, one day, to see valid principles for the organization ofsociety

(Joseph Beuys)

Joseph Beuys, Documenta VI, Kassel 1977

Beuys, the Man A detailed analysis of the problematics that exercised Joseph Beuys as both man and artist. Man is a microcosm who contains within himself the perfections of the world. He begins with natural elements; he feeds himself, proliferates in number, grows and exercises his animal senses. But man also has the sensibility of the angels; he can perceive the transcendent and the non-material. And it is because of these shared characteristics that his actions, his poesis, can become sublime. But one must also remember that while man can achieve full awareness of self, he is also capable of perversion—and this can become part of the execution of his own plans and projects. True, he can feel delight in being master and not slave of the world; but this joy must be tempered with a sense of responsibility, an awareness that he will have to answer for his acts, an awareness of good and evil. As the world has developed, man has become narcissistic, greedy for admiration and contemptuous of those he manipulates; thirsty for power, he is like the administrator of a life that is full of emptiness, terrorized by ageing and death. (Robert Musil, The Man without Qualities) But there are also men who conquer the very peaks of the universal landscape; who, sloughing off the ego, strive for a goal in which their own intelligence is that of Mother Nature herself. The concrete reality of any human being does not lie in imagining what might have been but in considering what one has actually done, day after day, step by step, throughout one's life. In this sense, | have always compared Joseph Beuys to a diamond, observed as a whole: the “most noble of stones, the diamond seems to symbolize the concepts of perfection, light and irradiating illumination. Traditional Indian mineralogy sees the diamond as being born in the earth as an embryo, the crystal itself marking an intermediate stage in its development. Whilst the crystal is “immature,’ the diamond is mature, the very culmination of maturity. This achievement of perfection figures in Indian alchemy as a symbol associated with immortality and the Philosopher's Stone. In Tantric Buddhism, the diamond is the symbol of spiritual strength, which is unshifting and invincible. And in our own everyday language it is associated with hardiness and infrangible solidity. In Western traditions, the diamond has been the symbol of sovereignty, of incorruptibility and of absolute reality. According to Pliny it was a universal talisman that protected against all poisons and warded off evil spirits and bad dreams. It was the bringer of good luck. In European traditions, its apotropaic powers extended to wild animals, ghosts, witches and nightmares. In Russia, the diamond was traditionally seen as preventing lust and preserving chastity. In France it was said to ward off cholera and maintain the bonds that bind together friends or husband and wife. Hence, it has been known as the stone of reconciliation, innocence, wisdom and faith. In iconography, it has been a symbol of constancy, strength and other heroic virtues. And some popular beliefs have it that one diamond can generate others—just like wisdom can be the ancestral origin of further wisdom. The very form of an uncut diamond links up with the belief that, like the cube, this is a symbol of truth, wisdom and moral perfection. Here, one might cite the emblems adopted by the de' Medici dynasty. A verbal pun made the diamond (dio-amando-literally “loving god”) into a symbol of divine love, and three interlocking rings, each with a diamond, figured in the emblem of Cosimo de' Medici. Cosimo's son, Piero, would take up his father's emblem and modify it in line with prevailing heraldic rules: the ring with the 214

diamond now figured in the claws of a falcon, over the motto semper (always).

This was intended as an expression of an eternal love for God, of a fidelity that was unshakeable. Lorenzo il Magnifico would add three feathers to the ring— white, green and red—thus expressing that through love of God the three theological virtues of Faith Hope and Charity flourished within him; white was the colour of Faith, green of Hope and red of Charity. The de' Medici diamond has been interpreted as a symbol of the wisdom of the family and of its victory over itself and others. Botticelli, when depicting Minerva defeating the centaur, adorns the goddess's robe with a ring set with a large gleaming diamond. And if one looks at Renalssance art as a whole, one finds the diamond also being used as a symbol of equanimity, of courage in adversity, of the power to slough off all fear, of

following pages Joseph Beuys and Lucrezia De Domizio in the Paradise Plantation. Bolognano 1984

personal integrity and good faith. This insistence upon the various symbolic associations of the diamond is deliberate, as it offers one way to reflect upon Beuys as a man. Such comparisons might seem rather audacious to the reader. But they would not seem so if, like myself, one had had the opportunity to spend fifteen years enriched by the spirit and energy of such a special and unique man—a person who could point out a totally new way of approaching Art and Life. To understand Beuys the Man and Beuys the Artist one must see him, as one must see a diamond in its entirety, in its many facets. The stone's range of symbolism perfectly captures the various aspects of the man and artist which, as this book unfolds, the reader will see flow together into one individual. Beuys never concealed any aspect of his personality; he was always someone of great moral and ethical integrity. For him a “half life" was not a life, just as the components of a split diamond are not the equal of the whole. Many still ask: “Who was Joseph Beuys?" The extravagant artist of the Felt Hat? A poet and lover of Nature? A philosopherpreacher? Joseph Beuys was, first and foremost, a man who loved his fellow humanity and the nature within which humankind lives. As an artist he did not invent a method; instead, he dedicated his entire life to the generous pursuit of ways to improve the methods that already exist within our society. The crisis of modern man—his loss of identitvr—were the factors that motivated Joseph Beuys's entire life as man and artist. Within the world of reality, he sought out a means of access to the truth—a truth that cannot be found using the arbitrary, invented system within which we live. One must look to the world as it exists. Man simply has to rediscover the truth within himself, within his public and private behaviour, within Nature. Beuys almed to arouse a human consciousness that was trapped within the avidity of consumerism precisely because it had forgotten the fundamental principles of Mother Nature. Their souls reconciled, Man and Nature will form the new world. This is the concept that underlies Beuys's thought as a whole. In this sense, the German artist can be said to have concerned himself with the entire problematic of an individual's daily life. Beuys was also a teacher, who loved his students and was loved by them in return. He engaged with politics, yet held that traditional politics was something that had had its days; drained of value, it was something that he strove to transform. He often talked about economics, recognizing in this discipline the fundamental right of every man to live by placing at the disposal of others his ability to produce goods and services. Beuys also discussed a number of other themes that centred upon humankind, each time with the sole aim of improving human existence. For Beuys, it was that existence which was the most precious of all possessions. As precious as a damond—more precious than a diamond. He was a man, an artist, who used all possible means to remind humankind to be true to its humanity. 215

RA BR

°° di; }

MAr j

vi

€

We have a duty to sow the seed. Certainly not all the seeds will sprout;

but for us it is enough ifone does. This will produce further fruit which will produce further seeds

(Joseph Beuys)

Beuys, the Sculptor Joseph Beuys was essentially, principally, a sculptor. In numerous of my lectures and publications | have defined him as the sculptor who is most emblematic of the 20th century: Sculptor of Forms, Sculptor of Souls. For his sculpture, Beuys used both visible materials (fat, felt, copper, iron, plants, wood, oil, wine, animals, stone) and invisible materials

(words, ideas, gestures, intuitions, smells, sounds, actions)... and even a specific mythology generated by his person itself—all with the end-purpose of creating his famous Living Sculpture. In his introductory comment to Tisdall's book, which was published in conjunction with the large retrospective held at the R. Solomon Guggenheim Museum in New York (October 1979), Beuys himself clearly spelt out his intent as an artist and as a sculptor: Beuys: My objects are to be seen as stimulants for the transfor mation of the idea of sculpture, or of art in general. They should provoke thoughts about what sculpture can be and how the concept of sculpting can be extended to the invisible materials used by everyone:

Thinking Forms - how we mould our thoughts or Spoken Forms —- how we shape our thoughts into words or Social Sculpture - how we mould and shape the world in which we live Sculpture as an evolutionary process; everyone is an artist. That is why the nature of my sculpture is not fixed and finished. Processes continue in most of them: chemical reactions, fermentations, colour changes, decay, drying up. Everything is in a state of change. With regard to that retrospective, my thoughts—thought being “the logical image of facts" (Wittgenstein)—turn to the 25 days spent in New York with Joseph Beuys. In the early days of September 1979 we were in Bolognano when Beuys called and asked us expressly to go to New York so that my husband Buby could take public and behind-the-scenes shots of the setting-up of the whole exhibition. Words cannot express the emotions we felt at receiving such a request. l'Il leave the reader free to imagine for himself. On that occasion Buby would end up taking about 3000 pictures. Beuys chose 166 in black and white (format: 18 x 24 cm) and laid them out in three groups of 30 and 76, all depicting various moments in the exhibition and the figures who had had a significant role in his life and work. He then asked Buby to reproduce them 220

on two separate emulsified canvases, upon which he himself then

intervened. In late November Buby and | were at Beuys's famous studio in Drakplatz. Beuys opened a huge old cupboard and, from his archive, took out two small black-and-white photographs of slightly different sizes. Rather yellowed by age, these two pictures depicted Russia during the First World War. They clearly did not belong to his personal past, and | thought they might be family mementoes. From his vest, Beuys then took out his legendary penknife, sharpened a thick pencil and, after looking long and carefully at the composition of the images on one of the emulsified canvases, glued one of the two photographs in place on one canvas—significantly under an image of Buby—and then framed the entire image with a pencil outline. He signed the canvas and entitled it Guggenheim Museum. The whole procedure was then repeated with the second canvas. Together with the catalogue curated by Caroline Tisdall and the event poster, these are the only two works that incontrovertibly bear historical witness to the Joseph Beuys Retrospective at the R. Solomon Guggenheim Museum in New York. The two works were catalogued by Beuys himself in the book Incontro con Beuys and exhibited—prior to his death—in various international Museums; for five years they hung in the Zurich Kunsthaus, in the famous room dedicated to Olivestone. Restored at Palazzo Durini, they are currently in La Casa di Lucrezia ready to... return to Zurich. Beuys's photographic language always served to give extended expression to his thought and ideas. It is clear in these two emblematic works how the artist's approach was rooted in two key notions. On the one hand, these images “set the seal” upon a certain place and upon human relationships—upon the active collaboration of those who had played a part in his historic Journey; first and foremost came his wife Eva and their two children, Jessyka and Wenzel, then his friends and supporters. This is clear from the choice of images: Scemela, René Block, Lucio Amelio, Harald Szeemann, Thomas Messer, Klaus Steack, Heiner Bastian, Johannes Stuttgen, Fryda and Ronald Feldman, his beloved students, and many many others. On the other hand, there is a focus upon the social issues raised by the notion of freedom and peace between peoples. Thereafter come such problematics as the concepts of space and time, of public and private, of creativity, of both new and archetypical languages, of memory and free collaboration and support. Beuys's art is one that touches upon the spirituality and universality of human life and society. He expressed the conscience of every person living on planet Earth. It should also be pointed here that a discussion of the materials that Beuys used in his works does not simply involve a description of their technical characteristics and the ways in which he employed them. lt also leads one on to a discussion of his concept of Social Art. 221

To return to the concept of sculpture, one should understand that for Beuys “sculpture” was not the exclusive gift of artists. In thinking, speaking and moving, each one of us gives expression to his vital energies, and in this way creates a “sculpture"—in the sense of a plastic rendition of the social. Hence Beuys's famous slogan "Each man is an Artist” which is often misunderstood and accused of causing confusion, of glossing over differences in role. Beuys: And it is precisely here that the falsification and misinterpretation of my ideas comes about. Deliberately, |mean. If |say “Each man is an Artist” | do not mean, for example, that every man is a great painter. That is something that has never even gone through my mind. | am referring to the qualities that each one of us can draw on in the exercise of a profession or job, whatever it is. lt can be a farmer or a nurse. | am referring, therefore, to the capacity one has to express, to fulfil something, to bring it about; and recognizing that this ability to carry out a task is artistic in character. That is what | meant and what | mean. Having cleared away short-sighted or simplistic interpretations, it is clear that Beuys's real intention was always to restore man to a real awareness of his own means—that is, the ability to work with Invisible Materials, with Words and Ideas, which are fundamental if man is to be able to work as a true artist for the improvement of society. In a certain sense, /nvisible Material is the amorphous social organism upon which man works, imposing his own meaning. And these meanings may be invisible but they are always present to Beuys, sculptor of souls. It is this which allows him to initiate a process of genuine collaboration between men of different origins and social status, working towards the goal of a new world in full respect of their freedom and creativity. In his own works Beuys also used Visible Materials, whose physical presence served to express the potential to transmit ideas, the capacity to transform things; to both increase the energy of production and maintain levels of energy. One can see therefore why the materials Beuys used in his works, aktionen and discussions are not to be compared with those used in Arte Povera or American Minimalism; they go beyond the pure process of representation to interpret the flow of human energy, in the sense of primitive and natural energy. They embody the flux of life and death, of humankind and the social character of art. It is clear that in all of Beuys's work, Visible and Invisible Materials—the symbolic (meaning, ideology, gesture) and the semiotic (voice, intonation, clothing, calligraphy, facial expression)—blend together in a universal language addressed to society as a whole. In this sense, Beuys is most thoroughly a sculptor, in that he is

open to the fascination exerted by a Mother

Nature who

source of life and the guardian of mystery and substance. 222

is the

It is interesting to note that he achieved such universality in his work and ideas precisely as the result of a process of evolution and development through and within what one might call artistic praxis. Beuys himself spoke of this “process” Beuys: / approached my early sculptural forms with the simple ideas of an illustrator; that such forms emerge meant a great deal to me. | had an interest in the forms themselves. In 1952 naturally | had never thought that these forms could one day become an inter esting topic of discussion. The formal aspect, which was decisive in 1952, could understandably serve in the late 1950s as a guide to interpretation, to confirm and experience a new scientific concept. At that time | attempted to deal with the heat concept in sculpture; it was already clear to me in 1952 that it would be extremely inter esting to bring it to expression in sculpture. | knew at that time that these elements play a sculptural role.

These words make it clear that all of Beuys's work is heavily connoted in the symbolic sense. This work is in part the fruit of intuitive creativity and in part related to an interest in experimental science—vwhich is confirmed by his research into the concept of heat. This is an aspect whose importance should not be underestimated); it is precisely due to the concept of “heat"—to the kaleidoscope of visual, intellectual and spiritual notions it involves—that Beuys could develop an entirely new conception of art and life: his socalled “Theory of Sculpture. For Beuys, malleable material is the stuff of Art laying itself open to reality, as embodied in the circeumstance of the work itself and (in a less manifest but no more important way) in the social context of that work. Malleable material is the substance of the work of art just as the brain is the raw material of thought. A schematic outline of Nature as dynamic, the Theory of Sculpture identifies each special level of reality; it is, in a sense, a Theory of Reality.

Chaos Indeterminate Organic Warm Expansion Nature Will Unconscious Intuition

Motion Feeling Soul

Order Determinate Crystalline Cold Contraction Spirit Intellect Conscious Thought

223

Beuys: What interested me was the general “warmth “ character, which forms an important part of the Theory of Sculpture and extends even to social and political concepts. This warmth character is to be found in honey,

in wax, and even in the pollen and

nectar gathered from plants. In mythology honey was regarded as a spiritual substance, and bees were godly. The bee cult is basically a Venus cult ... This was widespread and influenced by the whole process of honey production as a link between earthly and heavenly levels. The influx of a substance from the whole environment—plants, minerals and sun—was the essence of the bee cult. The allusion is to socialism, as practised in the big watchmaking co-operatives of the Republic of the Bees at La Chaux-de-Fonds. There you can still see many sculptures of bees on the walls and foundations, as symbols of socialism. This does not mean mechanistic state socialism, but a socialist organism in which all parts function as in a living body. In physt ological terms this is not hierarchical: the queen beeSsplace lies between head and heart, and the drones become the cells which are constantly renewed. The whole builds a unity which has to function perfectly, but in a humane warm way through principles of cooperation and brotherhood. Honey and Wax: For Beuys both of these are of great importance as they are the products of an organic society of bees, working in harmony and cooperation. This is a perfect metaphor of human cooperation, and thus the substances take on a political significance. One can understand how, as far as Beuys was concerned, the ideas regarding Sculpture were not, and could not be, an end unto themselves. In this sense, what he has to say about Bees and Honey is not merely incidental. This is clear when one looks at the series entitled Queen Bees, a significantly symbolic nucleus of work which allowed him for the first time perhaps to speak directly of his Theory of Sculpture. Beuys: The heat organism of the bee colony is without a doubt the essential element of connection between the wax and fat and the bees. VVhat had interested me about bees, or rather about their life system, is the total heat organization of such an organism and the sculpturally finished forms within this organization. On one hand bees have this element of heat, which is a very strong fluid element, and on the other hand they produce crystalline sculptures; they make regular geometric forms. Here we already find something of sculptural theory, something that is practiced regularly by bees. The element of heat that is present in honey can also be found in wax, in pollen and even in nectar. In fact, bees draw their nourishment from plants that have a particularly high caloric content. Beuys's notions with regard to the organization of bee society were taken largely from Rudolf Steiner (1861-1925). But unlike Steiner, 224

Beuys does not totally assimilate human and bee society. He points out that within bee society there is the total “resolution” of each individual within the complex of the body social, whilst in human society the individual as a thinking subject is an integral part of the society to which he belongs. Beuys, therefore, differs from Steiner in that he does not see bee society as composed of single entities, whilst a human state is. Bees have only a collective, not an individual, function. One might compare bees to the hair on our bodies... So one must be careful not to consider each single bee as an individual. Instead, each single bee is like a cell. The 7heory of Sculpture describes the movement that all things In this world go through in passing from the state of chaos to one of order. Raw material, unchannelled will, is chaotic, and as such is associated with heat. Material becomes ordered when it has undergone a process that gives it form; and this is rendered symbolically in the concepts of movement and heat. Thus material acquires form and definition; it appears in a crystalline state; it can be represented schematically by the tetrahedron that is characteristic of cold. But If the process is taken to an extreme, the crystal burns, it becomes over-intellectualized waste, and is ejected from the System. Viewed in psychological terms, at one extreme of this schema we have a figure who is motivated by the chaotic heat of will; at the centre is a figure governed by feeling and heart; and the other ex treme we have the figure who has achieved ratiocination and order. The ideal situation is one of balance, which Beuys envisaged as a constant flux between the areas of thought, feeling and will—not as some sort of irreversible static condition. The processes of art are a metaphor for the modelling and moulding of society: hence Social Modelling. It is only by taking these ideas into account that one can under stand the materials that Joseph Beuys used in his work. The text Aktion Dritter Weg is, therefore, not to be seen as some sort of utopian daydream but as a development of ideas that are supported by a fully thought-out conceptual framework. And honey is a symbol of all of this, an embodiment of heat and warmth produced through social cooperation. Let us now move from honey to one of the key materials Beuys opted to use: animal fat.

Animal Fat: \t is the ideal material in which to embody the Theory of Sculpture because it can take on both physical extremes: chaotic and formless liquid, when it is hot, and order and defined solid when it is cold. It is a malleable material par excellence and can take on any form. Beuys: Animal fat was a great discovery for me, because it was the material that could seem most chaotic and indeterminate. | could use hot and cold to intervene upon this material; | could transform 225

it using means that are not part of traditional sculptural instruments (for example, temperature). So | could change the character of this animal fat from a chaotic fluctuating state to a condition of rigid form. The fat passed from a chaotic condition to one of movement and finally settled into a geometrical setting. Thus | had three fields of force, and that was the idea behind sculpture: the force of the chaotic state, of a state of movement and a state of solid form. These three features—chaos, movement and form—made up the non-determinate energy from which | drew my complete theory of sculpture, of the physiology of humanity, of the power of the will, of the power of thought and the power of feeling. | saw that this was the right schema for an understanding of all the problems of society. And organically implied herein were all the problems of the body social, of individual humanity, of sculpture and art as they are in themselves Beuys: My initial intention in using fat was to stimulate discussion. The flexibility of the material appealed to me particularly in its reactions to temperature changes. This flexibility is psychologically effective—people instinctively feel it relates to inner processes and feelings. The discussion | wanted was about the potential of sculpture and culture, what they mean, what language is about, what human production and creativity are about. So | took an extreme position in sculpture, and a material that was very basic to life and not associated with art. At this time, although | had not exhibited, the students and artists who saw this piece did have some curious reactions which confirmed my feelings about the effect of placing fat in a corner. People started to laugh, get angry, or try to destroy It. The fat on the “Fat chair” is not geometric, as in the “Fat cor ners," but keeps something of its chaotic character. The ends of the wedges read like a cross-section cut through the nature of fat. | placed it on a chair to emphasize this, since here the chair represents a kind of human anatomy, the area of digestive and excretive warmth processes, sexual organs and interesting chemical change, relating psychologically to will power. The presence of the chair has nothing to do with Duchamp's Readymades, although they share initial impact as humorous objects. Now, fifteen years later, | can say that without this “Fat chair” and the “Fat corners” as vehicles none of my activities would have had such an effect. lt started an almost chemical process among people that would have been impossible if | had only spoken theoretically.

Beuys is here referring to his 1965 Fat Chair and to the famous Fat Corners that he had started to use in his numerous aktionen as early as 1963. Beuys: /t is clear that in the experiments—later known as aktionen or performances—carried out when | still worked within the framework of the Fluxus collective, | was striving towards a new form of society. Clearly Fat Corner was only a very small part of a vast con226

ceptual theory; but it is the definite form of a specific action. At the end of that process a form crystallized, in a creation, a tetrahedron image: animal fat within a spatial context—in a corner. Thus the aktion gave objective expression to the concept of will, within the Indistinct and chaotic circuit of energy. And so when talking about a circuit of energy | am not solely referring to the formal aspect of the work, but also to the internal field of man's power and energy... These comments make it clear how the imaginative experimental use of unusual materials was no mere chance, nor simply a formal decision with regard to the rendering of visible reality. On the contrary, it is obvious that Beuys's research as an artist was always closely bound up with a spiritual intent; he strove continually to liberate the unexpressed potential of human thought, feeling and will. Beuys: / needed means of expression. | already had the animal fat, but | needed another more “rapid” component, something that would conduct electricity, and so | used copper. Then | needed something to isolate one part from another, so | used felt...

Felt: As we saw in the previous section, felt was very important in Beuys's life itself. His experience with the Tatars took on the value of an initiation: death and mystical resurrection led to a change of sensibility. This new sensibility enabled Beuys to enter into a more elemental relationship with things—a relationship that, in a symbolic sense, might be said to depend upon a rite of shamanic initiation. As is well-known, felt features in numerous of Beuys's works. He used it for the first time in 1960, in small objects and in combination with animal fat. The development towards a more “spatial” use of the material began in 1963. However, Felt Corners were very different to Fat Corners. Felt is, in fact, a highly absorbent material: grease, dirt, dust, water and sound are all quickly absorbed and integrated with the environment it forms. Unlike a gauze or a filter, felt does not allow materials to pass through; it retains them within its substance and in the process becomes stiffer, thicker and thus more effective as an insulator. Unlike Fat Corner, Felt Corner does not take on the usual tetrahedron form of a corner. Felt is flexible, being composed of superimposed layers of animal hair (rabbit hair is best). The matted layers are compressed together to give the material body; hence felt has none of the woof and weave of woven fabrics, and this is why it can be stretched and widened to make the form one desires. In the course of his career, Beuys used felt in practically all his aktionen and in many works as a heat and energy insulator. Perhaps the most “macroscopic” use of the material was in the Felt Suit which Beuys wore in the 1971 aktion entitled /solation Unit—a suit which the René Block Gallery then produced as a multiple of 100. Beuys: Yes, of course, the Felt Suit is not only a joke, it is an exten227

sion of my felt sculptures, which | also produced during my aktionen. Here felt serves as both a source of warm and as an insulator. In all the caloric sculptures, it is mainly used in relation to animal fat. So it is linked with the notion of heat. The concept of heat goes much further; it is not to be understood solely as physical heat, because if | had intended this then it would have been more effective to use an infra-red light. The truth is that | mean a very different type of heat: spiritual warmth, a principle of evolution and development. The essential resort to symbol in Beuys's work is to be seen even in the way he uses his own physical presence. This can be seen, for example, in the Felt Hat, which is one of the most provocative emblems of the artist and would become as famous as his work as a whole. Beuys: This hat represents another kind of head and functions like another personality. Many people are strangely involved with it and it works like a permanent theatre, there in front of people's eyes but not immediately decipherable. VVhen they describe it flatly as a trademark this is because the meaning is not really clear to them. That's exactly what | meant when | talked of the shaman: it is impossible to decipher precisely the way it functions. A simple meaning would be that the hat alone can do the work and acts as a vehicle—l/ personally am not so important anymore ... lt is an attempt to lead humankind in what one might call a spontaneous way, like an artistic concept applied to the whole world of work. This means that | myself in this precise moment am the work of art. lt means that the aim is for man himself to become the work of art. Now, when | say this, | do not lay claim to being a particularly worthy work of art. | am only indicating a direction for development, a way in which the work of art in itself can be realized through man; in which man can take part in the realization of the world as a work of art. Clear? As for the hat as a piece of permanent theatre, it refers to my will to contemplate both the tragic and comic aspect of things. The tragi-comedy which goes much deeper into things than either comedy or tragedy is a form typical of our world today. And as | am part of the art of action, | represent all this...

Perhaps the most famous comment with regard to the hat—and why he was always to be seen wearing it—is to be found in a chat Beuys had with some children in a Vienna studio in 1983. One asked: Why do you never take your hat off? Beuys: Should | take it off? (He takes it off). / do it simply for the children, because it's the right thing to do for them. Others always want something that is simply stupid. During the war | was a pilot and | sustained a head injury, so they put a metal plate in my skull. Since then my head has always been a little sensitive. Then, when | did the first “aktionen” —bits of theatre, reallvr—I wore a hat like 228

this for the first time. Since then | have had the feeling | should stay as l am. In effect, | have to stay like that—just as a horse does not put on something different every day. Or an elephant: he, too, always has the same stuff. | wanted to transmute myself into a species of natural being. | wanted the same things: just as a rabbit has those ears, so | wanted this hat. A rabbit is not a rabbit without the ears, so | thought: Beuys is not Beuys without the hat!! Felt was the unfailing accessory of Beuys's artistic persona. luomo dal Cappello di Feltro (The Man in the Felt Hat), my first publication on the artist—published by Massimo Riposati, Carte Segrete, Rome 1991—uses an expression that has now become familiar when referring to Beuys. With regard to the production of felt—for which, as | have already mentioned, rabbit hair is the best—l am reminded of an amusing episode that took place at our home in San Silvestro Colli (outside Pescara) at Christmas 1976. Professor Giuseppe Consoli, a physician with a passionate interest in art who was a childhood friend of Buby's, presented Beuys with the gift of a rabbit in a bright pink box complete with punctured lid; the air holes made the thing look rather like a work by Lucio Fontana... Taking up a quote from the artist Vettor Pisani at that year's Venice Biennale, Beuys produced the famous postcard VW/ho says that the Rabbit doesn't like Joseph Beuys? A phrase written inside the box that contained Prof. Consoli's rabbit. When he left Abruzzo for Dusseldorf in his famous Blenklei, Beuys took the small rabbit with him, later setting it free to roam about his property at Veert; it would die in the 1980s. Copper and Iron: \hilst felt is an insulating material, copper is the very opposite. lt represents a conductor, a conduit of electricity; we have already seen Beuys refer to this metal as “a very rapid element, a bearer of electricity!” He used it in various works—notable in the Fond series—as a conductor of energy, as a real electrical phenomenon. The dominant notion in these works is that of a battery, suggested by the superimposition of alternating layers of copper and felt. One of the first was Fond Il (1968), which was exhibited at Documenta IV as well as elsewhere.

following pages Beuys before RAI cameras installing Incontro con Beuys. Palazzo Durini, May 12, 1984. The work is in the permanent collection of the Guggenheim Museum, New York, since 1985

Beuys: /n “Fond Il” the concentration is on the electrical charging of an object, in this case two tables thickly coated with copper. The tables have the connotation of a normal working place and become a fond on which other objects can be placed. Through the process of induction and charging via the battery and the inductor a charge is released. It was exhibited several times in a charged state of 20,000 volts at Documenta

IV. at Eindhoven, and at M6nchenglad-

bach. The charge from the 12-volt battery is transformed to 20,000 volts in the inductor so it is a high tension system creating big 229

sparks, though the amperes diminish. In the object every stage of transformation is visible, though the sparks are scarcely perceptible in daylight. The charge is quick in this “Fond II” with the emphasis is on copper as a swift conductor, in contrast to the felt which acts as an insulator. Thus copper is often used in combination with felt, which can insulate and isolate energy. But in Beuys's work, copper has deeper and more profound—more symbolic—significance, its character of energy and warmth associating it with the female.

Beuys: This relates to woman, and the female element in general. To express spiritual power and potential | tend usually to use the female figure. Only when an extremely masculine intention is implied, like the spirit of Mars in “Tram Stop” (1976 Venice Biennale), or overintellectualized concentration on the powers of the head, does the male image appear. This is because | believe in the female generally as possessing strengths in every field which have been underused in the past. | would characterize this as a greater openness to the possibilities of the future. The basic ability to bear children, for instance, extends to many other levels of productivity where the male is more limited—this is the association with the queen bee. And if copper is the female element in the work, it is counterbalanced by the male element of iron—as in works such as Tram Stop or PiCoFe; the last version of this latter work dates from 1972 and symbolizes the family of Iron (Fe), Platinum (Pt) and Cobalt (Co) linked with the figures of Mars and Napoleon. Copper is also used together with felt and animal fat in the work Incontro con Beuys, created in 1974 in Pescara as part of the Discussion on Direct Democracy; this work was then re-presented by the artist at Palazzo Durini (Bolognano) in 1984. The entire display case of /ncontro con Beuys has since 1987 been in the collection of the Guggenheim Museum, New York. One should also consider the fact that iron undergoes change over time—and, more than any other, Beuys was an artist who explored the dimension of Time rather than that of Space... Stone: is a material which becomes of prime importance in Beuys's later work, above all in three Important pieces: the 1982 7000 Eichen in Kassel (with basalt stele), the 1983 Das ende des 20. Jahrhunderrts (The End of the Twentieth Century) and the 1984 Olivestone. Inorganic and crystalline, stone is the material which most totally represents the notions of form, reason, order and death, in contrast with the opposites of chaos, warmth and life. As Felix Baumann points out, a special feature of Beuys's_ work with stone is that he overcomes the duality cold-warmth, reasonintuition, life-death. By animating the stone, which is in itself dead,

232

Sandstone from Lettomanoppello (Chieti) for Olivestone.

Beuys calls it back to life. One should, however, note the difference between the stone of Olivestone and the use of the material in the basalt steles that accompany the 7000 Oaks in Kassel. Whilst the steles will remain unchanged as the trees undergo organic growth, in Olivestone the continual addition of olive oil will cause the corrosion of the ancient stone. As Baumann notes: “The principles of warmth and energy win out over coldness and the absence of life." A peculiar characteristic of what would be one of his last works thus arises not from an imposition of extraneous ideas but from within the very conception of the work itself. The piece seems to stand as a worthy conclusion to Beuys's whole artistic career, to his aspiration towards the universal and universalizing. This is the triumph of life over death—and, as we will see, this passage from life to death played an important part in Beuys's ideas (and was linked with the symbol of the hare). Sound: Influenced by the artistic notions of the Fluxus movement—and by his own personal conception of a primordial, synaesthetic sense perception that would make it possible to maintain an elemental relationship with things—Beuys saw sound as being a fundamental component of his own particular gesamtkunstwerk. In all of his works, sound, noise—or silence—play a key part. In effect, sound takes on the qualities of an unformed material. It is par excellence the symbol of perpetual movement, given that it no longer exists at the very moment that it is halted. As we have already seen from his own comments, the artist was very interested in the Fluxus Movement's use of music. And one of the notions suggested by his own Plight (1985) is that of an inner listening to the self. But there is also another aspect to the world of Beuys's artistic imagination and ideas, an aspect that is firmly rooted in an animal reality whose core is imbued with spirituality. Throughout his work, Beuys explored a complex relation with the world of animals. Whatever their position in the evolutionary chain, they are always seen as endowed with special powers— and hence we see Beuys's interest in the animal myths which are universally present throughout the world. Furthermore, this use of animals asserted the need for humankind to resist a reduction of the notion of evolution to a merely positivistic and materialistic view of the world. We have already looked at Beuys's interest in bees and their production of honey. Now we will examine the radical steps he took in making animals a physical presence and participant in his works themselves; memorable examples of this involved coyotes, horses, stags, swans, dead hares and the Flying fox (native to the Seychelles). In effect, the animal world was already part of a personal all-embracing mythology which Beuys had developed as a child—a mythology which enabled him to see all aspects of reality (both physical and 234

Beuys playing piano at villa Durini. San Silvestro Colli, Pescara, November 1973

spiritual) as integral parts—rather than limited components—of a “vhole. His use of animals was never merely provocative; it was not one of those extravagances which, who knows why, are to be forgiven in the name of art. His approach drew its reality and validity from the on-going vitality within himself of those faculties with which each individual starts life: feeling, thought and will. The Hare: As already mentioned, this made its first appearance in Beuys's 1963 Sibirische Sympholie 1. Staz., its role within the work being to show Nature representing herself. Beuys never uses the hare to express the notions associated with that particular animal in our discursive traditions. Shorn of any linguistic context and thus of imposed “significance, the hare is not used as a component of a discourse that reflects what we know (or think we know) about the animal. Instead. Beuys uses the hare as a “sample” of the properties of transformation, birth and death— which are part of the hare insofar as that hare is a “product” of the metamorphoses of Nature. As with all the animals used in Beuys's work, the symbolic significance of the hare is not to be seen in terms of metaphors, allegories or linguistic signs. In effect, this is a symbol that forces us to come to terms with the impossibility of any resort to semantics. What is present does not refer us elsewhere to what is absent; instead, it asserts its own perfectly resolved being, which is identical with that which is present. In Beuys's work it is Nature that is present The hare is an animal that has a close relation with the earth in which it hides; it is a fecund animal, which in the Middle Ages was a symbol of carnal lust. However, it is also fragile and harmless; within Christian iconography, the hare is the symbol of the man who trusts in God. Both the hare and the stag are animals seen as moments of transformation. The hare embodies the earth; it assimilates the earth and makes its laws its own—just as God, by becoming incarnate, made the laws of Life his own by dying on the cross. In the same way, man could be said to achieve his real identity by recognising his being as both animal and rational. The hare also expresses a necessity that applies to humankind as well: the need to “immerse oneself” in our animal ancestry.

VWVith regard to the stag, Beuys says: The stag appears in times of distress and danger. It brings a special element: the warm positive element of life. At the same time it is endowed with spiritual powers and insight and is the accompanier of the soul. When the stag appears dead or wounded it is usually as a result of violation and incomprehension... (the mercurial nature of the stag is expressed in Its antlers. The flow of blood through them reflects a twelve-month 236

Flying Fox, giant bat from the Seychelles, December 1980

cycle: the mobility of blood, sap, hormones)... Yes, and death... death is quite a complicated thing. The purpose of Western thinking and the science that grew from it was to reach material, but one only does that through death. If you take the brain as being the material basis of thought, as hard and glassy as a mirror, then it becomes clear that thinking can only be fulfilled through death, and that a higher level exists for it through the liberation of death: a new life for thinking. The shamanic component in this attitude is clear, and a comparison with Mircea Eliade's description of such practices in Siberia reveals amazing similarities. “The presence of a helping spirit in animal form, [or] dialogue with it in a secret language ... is another way of showing that the shaman can forsake the human condition, is able in a word ‘to die‘ From the most distant times all animals have been concelved either as psychopomps that accompany the soul into the beyond, or as the dead person's new form. Whether it is the ‘ancestor’ or the ‘initiatory master/ the animal symbolizes a real and direct connection with the beyond. In a considerable number of myths and legends all over the world the hero is carried into the beyond by an animal... among the Siberians and Altaians they can appear in the form of bears, wolves, stags, hares and in all kinds of birds” The mystery that envelops the mythical figures of certain animals is thus linked to the role of the shaman, understood as a totemic figure whose thought is expressed in ritual metaphors that function to reconcile the world of man and the world of Nature. Beuys: A primary work means, first and foremost, approaching things from a truly elemental point of view. This implies both a primary world and the idea of a starting-point for a vision of history as the global process of human evolution. But it also means interest in the past, with a return to a point of development in historvr—and an interest in the present and in the future. In effect, | use this shamanic notion to convey the idea that we do not have a full understanding of life, culture and anthropos. But we can have a full and correct understanding if we carry out a historical analysis of the past, a synthesis of the present; if we engage in futurological research into the future. This is a sort of system—a tactic or strategy—to stir within people a supplementary interest in research into the very principle of the future. But people cannot find the principles—the truth—needed to establish the future if they do not have clear ideas about their own nature; if they do not know their own evolution. This leads on to an interest in anthropology; and the best system that | have found for clarifying the various levels of consciousness, life and culture is the notion of the shaman. And this, in its turn, involves consciousness of all present energies, all dimensions of the spiritual. Now things proceed in a rather different fashion, with a very limited view of the concept of anthropology, with a materialism that distances us from 238

spiritual powers. In my “aktionen” | use a number of different beings—animals, plants, minerals—and elemental things that have a spiritual dimension within this world. | might also speak of angels, of the powers of the non-visible world; | could speak of birth and death, of that which comes before birth and after death... So, this use of the figure of the shaman was a strategic move; the scientific lectures came later. So, on the one hand, | was a sort of modern scientific analyst, on the other, in my “aktionen” | took on the “synthetic” existence of a shaman. This strategy was aimed to stir the public to ask questions; it was not intended to offer a complete and perfect structure. In some ways it was a psychoanalysis, with all these problems of energy and culture. I would argue that this cosmic aspect that Beuys sees in art as human creativity has various analogies with the primordial developments that occurred in prehistoric periods. In effect, in the prehistory of humankind the invention of images was not the fruit of art envisaged as a process of aesthetics. The image was a symbolic, magical thing; it served for personal definition, for transcendental connection with the world. As a fetish, it was part of religious activity, and—last but not least—it also served as a means of exploring and discovering nature and one's own environment. In his book entitled Le geste e /a parole, the French scholar of prehistoric art André Leroi-Gourhan would write: “.. The first, very important, sign of imaginative exploration of nature is aesthetic feeling. That which attracts people to bizarre forms, to shells, stones, teeth and claws, fossils, is certainly a very deeply-seated aspect of human behavior. Chronologically, it is humankind's first expression of such aesthetic interest. However, it is also a sort of adolescence of the natural sciences, because in all civilizations the dawn of science is marked by a taste for the bric-a-brac of ‘curiosities. It is difficult when reading these observations not to think of the games Beuys played in childhood, which always combined a typically scientific curiosity and an interest in the form of real objects (an interest that was clear evidence of an aptitude for the arts). In Beuys, this came before any expression in an artistic Medium—in his case, drawing (a topic discussed in the Fourth Station). And the same thing can also be seen in the development of primitive peoples: “Figurative art proper is preceded by something much more obscure—or more general—which corresponds to the ‘thinking through' of the visual forms of things. An unusual form, which stirs the interest of the figurative imagination, can only exist as such when the subject compares the ordered image of his own universe with the objects that come into that field of perception. And the most highly unusual objects are those which do not belong directly to the world of the living and yet seem to demonstrate or reflect the properties of the living ... Concretions—crystals that project light-touch the deepest thoughts of humankind; within Nature, they are like words or thoughts, symbols of form and movement ... Furthermore, one can239

not see why the art of Nature should be more gratuitous that the art of humankind: in fact, it is part of the same field of concerns.” But the proof of the links between the ideas expressed by LeroiGourhan and Beuys's notions regarding Social Modelling and creativity, lies in the conclusion that the French scholar reaches. Here the affinity with Beuys is truly striking. “The emergence of arts capable of tracing out a virgin path for themselves is an important issue, because human energy is linked with the establishment of ascending rhythms. The loss of manual ability, of the personal relationship of man and material in the exercise of crafts, has eliminated one of the possibilities for individual aesthetic renewal. In another sense, the general spread of the arts means that the mass of people throughout the world experience them in a passive manner. In art, the same thing happens as in adventure stories: Chinese painting and Mayan sculpture go into decline just like cowboys and Zulus, because there has to be a minimum of participation in order The problem of the personal allowance of art is to feel something. just as important for the future of Homo sapiens as the impulse of decline to be seen in art.” lt is within a framework of this kind that one must understand Beuys's striving to resist the total loss of humankind creativity, his work to maintain humankind's ability to model a new organism of themselves and the world in which they live. In short, to preserve the human ability to sculpt. As a man, Beuys invested all the energies at his disposal in his work. Such energies had to find concrete expression as visual, olfactory, aural, manual, emotive, mental and linguistic forces. The latter two of these powers are those covered in his theory of “invisible materials"—that is, ideas and their primary objectification in language. Beuys: /t is only the human capacity for thought that can bring new causes into the world. From the 1970s onwards Beuys participated in numerous lectures, discussions and meetings throughout the world, with his focus necessarily being on the ‘materials’ of ideas and words. Hence his use of the blackboard, an object that would become one of the emblematic presences in his art. The works which include blackboards embody an extended concept of Sculpture: the forms of thought are modelled in words, those words are organized in lectures and ideas are visually structured in schema. This is sculpture that envisages the use of the voice—a voice which Beuys demonstrated to be the living communicator of energy, a means for the direct sculpting of ideal forms. Language is the great transformer because all problems are fundamentally linguistic. Language is the form of thought.

Beuys: /t is vital that humankind should slowly learn to speak, should come out of its dumbness, and this applies above all to the 240

Lucrezia De Domizio in Bologna for the Art Fair installing an information stand for Beuys's discussion, January 1984

J. BEUYS A DELLA NATI

241

man in the street. He must become conscious of the fact that fundamentally he knows an enormous amount and that an official or state education just does not make it possible for him to clarify his thoughts and feelings firstly into words and then into free speech. This amounts to saying that it makes it impossible for him to work together with other human beings within the conceptual field. For me it is the WORD that produces all images. It is the key sign for all processes of moulding and organizing. V/hen | use language, | try to induce the impulses of this power... the power of evolution. But the concept of language in Beuys is not to be seen in merely reductive terms as referring to speech and words; there is an entire world of sounds and noises that are generated by formal impulses. In effect, this is the language of primary sounds, which have no semantic contents and yet, at other levels, are rich in information. Beuys imitates the language of animals; to his own (rational) language he gives the form of animal language (that is, how this latter appears to the eyes of reason). Thus, Beuys imitates the animal in order to include the “animalness” which within man forms the “other” to rationality. And as we have already seen, in numerous aktionen of the 1960s, sound formed an integral part. I would thus argue that Beuys offers the most comprehensible, the truest, form of that which is referred to as Conceptual Art. There is no coldness, no mere intellectualization. For what is the point of intellectualizing without human warmth, without the poetic afflatus of the heart? Furthermore, Beuys is not concerned with quoting art and culture; he does not make statements that are limited to the world of art. He considers such a stance meaningless because stripped of the seeds of life which must, at one and the same time, be real and spiritual. Beuys sees the traditional concept of art as being totally pointless. Any type of understanding that tends to divide forms of production (and art is a form of production) into a hierarchy of importance is highly dangerous. For Beuys, Art is the one philosophy of life that can set humankind free. And what a monstrous thing it would be if that Art were restricted to the privileged category of “artists. Hence, the one solution is that A// Men are Artists—as Beuys first famous dictum asserted. This is an anthropological conception of art, which divides the present from the past and looks towards the future. For Beuys this is what is important. He has no interest in all the futile questions that the so-called artistic “avant-garde” insisted on posing. This is very clear in a discussion that Beuys had in Basel in October 1985 with various other famous artists: Jannis Kounellis, Anselm Kiefer and Enzo Cucchi. It might be useful here to quote a few extracts in order to give some idea of the character and ideas of those involved. 242

Kounellis: ... But | insist on this point because | want to talk about this scale; | believe that at the beginning is the image, then come music and literature. Beuys: / am not certain; anyway, | am not interested in this scale. Man will have said something to accompany the image—and most attempts at articulation in language can be interpreted musically. Kounellis: They must be musical. But it is important that one could not get to the central crux through music, because music does not touch upon the problems we are dealing with here. Beuys: But it does... in music, in painting and also in poetry. Kounellis: Poetry perhaps. But we have doubts here because we are painters. | have spoken to a number of musician and composers, and they do not have the same doubts and questions as we do. We however always give priority to art, because for our identity as artists it is a representation of the human; it is less abstract than literature. Beuys: / would not dare establish qualitative differences between the painting of Barnet Newman and the literature of James Joyce. As far as | am concerned, both are of great value and merit. Kounellis: ... But there is a great difference: James Joyce's title Ulysses refers to a certain type of story-telling; it represents the characters in a certain manner. Newman, on the other hand, is ideologically abstract. Beuys: There is no fundamental qualitative difference between the work of someone who uses abstraction and someone whose work is expressed in fictional characters. They are only different methods, intrinsic to the disciplines concerned. Of course painting cannot be literature, otherwise it would be bad painting. But, in the same way, literature cannot become painting, otherwise it would be bad literature. Which means that we have to start from all the various disciplines; start with the Seven Muses.

following pages Joseph Beuys and Lucrezia De Domizio installing /ncontro con Beuys on the artist's birthday, May 12, 1984, Bolognano, Palazzo Durini

Kounellis: | mean that Newman is ideologically abstract, whilst Malevich is ideologically figurative. | am talking about the difference that exists within painting itself. Beuys: Perhaps. But, in any case, this is a problem that does not interest me at all. | do not want to contradict Kounellis, but | do not see how one can get at the more important things by making these types of distinction; | think they simply prevent us from making much more important decisions. Kiefer: | think that Jannis and Beuys are both taking firm stands,

but on terrain | cannot share. | think that saying that man is at the centre of things is wishful thinking; | am not convinced. And | do not believe that every man is an artist, in the way Beuys intends 243

dt

PE

that claim. | do not even think that there is some sort of development towards which one can work so that each person can become an artist. Beuys: /f you keep your eyes open when looking at people you can see that each person is an artist. | have just been in Madrid and | saw that the street-sweepers there are geniuses. You can see it from how they carry out their work, and from their faces. You can see that these street-cleaners represent a new form of society. | saw in them something that is missing in lurid artists— because most artists are opportunists. Let me say it: most artists are shits. They form the most reactionary class of all. Basically, there are no longer any classes, but artists are so reactionary that they practically form a new class. | understood that the streetsweepers

were greater poets that many contemporary poets.

Kounellis: Perhaps they are great poets. But they do not have a form within which to communicate. Beuys: Yes they do! Kiefer: But perhaps they are not aware of it. Kounellis: Those Madrid street-cleaners have perhaps every chance of being poets; but you cannot say that that Jorge in Madrid is Homer. Beuys: / do not want to set those street-cleaners at the same level as Homer; Homer did something else. But those street-cleaners represent the future.

Beuys: ... / have to include other people as well. There are farmers who are artists and who grow potatoes. Kounellis: They are not subversive artists. Beuys: How can you say a thing like that? If a man can try out something real; if he can develop a product of vital importance from within the earth, then you have to consider him as a creative being within that field. In that sense you have to accept him as an artist. Kounellis: Producing potatoes is a type of cultivation that is not part of the same culture as literature.

Beuys: Naturally itis not the same culture as literature... or it is an art different to the art of painting. Kounellis: No, not art: culture. Obviously here | understand Beuys, who himself places potatoes in museums.

Beuys: The difficulty is that we are working with different concepts. | work with a widened concept of art, with the concept of social culture (which is the most important form of art). Kounellis is still talking about art in the traditional sense; he is talking about the tradition of painting. He is always citing Masaccio and people 246

like that... who are long gone. Let's finally try to find a system that transforms the entire social organism into a work of art, which embraces the entire process of work—that is, both the work of Goya, of Kounellis or myself as well as agriculture, educational sciences and technology; so that there is a real quality to the entire principle of production and consumption. One must transform not simply the way paintings or sculpture are made but rather the whole form of society. It is an enormous

project.

Kounellis: So one risks being infiltrated by people who have nothing to do with what one is doing. The problem is too big. How is one to transform all that? Perhaps Beuys does not appreciate the differences in the evaluation of power, because—honestly—the artist is more necessary now than he was before; you cannot put everything back together again by returning to 1968. On the contrary, there is a real need for artists to seize back power. Beuys: / must point out that Christ was not creative, because he was not a painter. Kounellis: Our culture is like a huge plane tree. Every spring it puts forth new leaves; we are the leaves of this plane tree. Beuys: / find that image of the plane tree interesting, expressive. But nowadays that tree does not produce a Masaccio but rather electricity, atom bombs, knowledge of physics, medicines. The plane tree produces a lot, and our era is very interesting and incredibly exciting. Above all, that tree produces a lot of art. Kounellis: To tell the truth, | was referring to the plane tree that only produces art. There are perhaps other plane trees that produce medicine. Cucchi: There is a field of plane trees. Beuys: That doesn't work! Kounellis: Schwitters, for example, can't be cut away from the tree of the tradition of German painting.

Beuys: But that is of no interest. WVe are hardly art historians! We want to talk about how one can redefine the concept of art nowadays, in such a way that art can thrive, and that the plane tree can generate atom bombs in line with the method of art—that is, felicitous atom bombs, works of art not destructive atom bombs. We cannot make the hospital system disappear just by wishing that the tree would only generate paintings. We already have too many paintings. The method of humankind's labour and work should be such that the plane tree generates truly useful products. At the moment, some of the things on the plane tree are interesting but 90% of them are pointless; we have already mentioned this hundreds of times. But when discussing this image of the plane tree one should repeat it. So where does Masaccio come into all this now? Of course, | know that he was a great painter. 247

Beuys: This discussion of art is focusing on old art; what interests me is what is developing now—which naturally developed from old art (of which modern art is a part). |am interested in anthropological art, which is concerned with things that are very different to the very small step taken by Marcel Duchamp with his pissoir, when he took an industrial product into a museum and declared it to be a work of art. Logically, Duchamp should have linked his experiment to the fact that all men are artists, given that he himself had not made the pissoir but simply moved a thing from one place/situation to another; the true designers and creators of his “product” were dozens of other people. Kiefer: Right. But it was he who gave this product its spirit. In effect, he was the one who created it. It was not visible before. Beuys: Precisely. This is what's boring about that scarecrow raised to frighten the right-minded. He wanted to do something particularly extravagant. Kounellis: | am not talking about old art but the tradition of art.

Beuys: That art is part of old art. | think Marcel Duchamp‘ art is really old. Kounellis: Duchamp is 19th-century; Brancusi belongs in the ancient tradition of the Old Masters. Beuys: For all that we had Duchamp, Mondrian and Picasso, we still had the Second World War. And if we are still willing to tolerate that, within our vicinity, other such catastrophes can happen to other people, then we might well engage in talk about Art. But now that does not interest me. You can talk about sculpture if you are a teacher, to explain its criteria of quality to students. But we have to talk about the future interpretation of culture which should emerge from art. Because it can no longer arise from another level of society. It can no longer emerge from the motive forces of economics or even law, because money there creates a state of total injustice; I mean, money is not some sort of badge for the recognition of rights and duties. For those who make profit from/through it, money is anarchic, because it allows them to do so at the expense of others. And if production fails to work properly, a war is provoked, weapons are producedì/ it is all good business. If we want things to carry on like this, then we can sit here discussing sculpture. so, one might say that in a certain sense Beuys is not an artist— that is, he is not an artist in the traditional understanding of that term and of the role such a figure plays in the world. However, when one looks at the heavy vein of symbolism in his work, one sees that Beuys is totally and wonderfully an artist. His symbolism is that quid which constitutes a work of art as something with its own life—an inherent vitality that is a powerful component of 248

works of art throughout history. Still, it is important that symbol not be confused with concept, with meaning; because if it is, then the words that explain a work of art would be enough. This is what Beuys had to say on the matter of such “explanation” in an interview: Interviewer: Is there an explanation for the felt, a translation for the animal fat?

Eva, Jessyka and Joseph Beuys with Lucrezia and Buby Durini, in the Aceto Sante home-cheasel used for realizing the stone “parallelepipeds” for Olivestone-celebrate the end of the works. Lettomanoppello December 1984

Beuys: Yes; but not in the sense of “meaning. That would mean that behind the work ofart there is a “message” proper. And thus one would get to that decadent concept of aesthetics according to which the work of art is not the all-in-itself but rather the idea which stands behind that “all.

Interviewer: Can't one give a little help here? Beuys: Yes, one can do that. You can give descriptions and names of pictures; you can explain conceptual correlations, discuss what 249

led to the use of such materials. That you can do. But not in the sense of: this is what the work means. Often described as the Artist-Shaman, Beuys was not the sentimental preacher of Romantic ideals; he was not a utopian nostalgic, and even less was he a charlatan or a dreamer. At the end of his life Beuys was able to transform his Concrete Utopia into a Utopia of the Earth, and his works still stand as a concentration of energy; his art raised problems which are of continuing contemporary relevance; which concern issues that are central to the very “making of art” I will end here with a quote that expresses Beuys deep love of and faith in art. Beuys: Art is not there simply to be understood, or we would have no need of art. It could then be just logical sentences in the form of a text, for instance. VVhere objects are concerned, it's more the sense of an indication or suggestion.

250

Beuys's intervention on a poster for “Contemporanea” Rome 1973

Joseph Beuys leafs through the volume Incontro con Beuys in his Dusseldorf home, March 1984

Abr

TO

For me tt is the WORD that produces all images. It is the key sign for all processes ofmoulding and organizing. When I use language, I try to induce the impulses of this power... the power ofevolution

(Joseph Beuys) Joseph Beuys

at Docmenta VI, Kassel 1977

Beuys: Politics, Economics and Teaching Beuys's artistic research focused upon man and his creative energy. Hence, as we have already seen, he was interested in all the problems posed by human existence. Beuys's art advances one possible development for humankind: a growth of awareness of self and of one's own links with a society within which man is destined to achieve self-realization. For only he who considers himself to be free is destined to create history. Beuys saw that the social essence of man is only one aspect of his being. At the lowest level of his development, man is a natural being, then a social being... and finally a free being. Allowing for the respect and satisfaction of the most elementary needs, one might say that these three aspects of human evolution lead towards the creation of “a society with a human face” —a society which, as we shall see, is characterized by individualism, democracy and economic socialism. The free spirit generates a tendency towards individualism. His social essence means that man regulates his behaviour and relations on the basis of the democratic values implicit in law, whilst a social ist economy meets the material needs of the natural spirit. In his essence, man is inclined to freedom—a freedom in which resides the possibility of being creative. Creativity is the direct expression of the free sprit. Such creativity is not to be found solely in the field of art but is linked to the very nature of all human beings; it finds expression in all fields, in the exercise of all professions and crafts. Furthermore, it has to be recognised as one of the principles of life, because the creative being is that which constructs—and then serves as the driving force for—the new society. Such a being is the bearer of revolution. Beuyss second slogan—VWVe Are the Revolution—is an explicit call upon each individual to recognize his revolutionary potential; to understand that only within the everyday and within deep understanding of oneself and of others can one find a real possibility of evolution and development. Beuys: You cannot talk about these things or say anything about the three structures without establishing that the three structures originated at a certain point and that materialism originated at a certain point as an educational opinion which again has its own inner logic: how can man attain materialism? How can men be brought to the point where they are very strongly, so to speak, in contact with the earth, in contact with matter? That is an incarnation process. Materi254

alism is—in this sense—a Christian method. Without Christ there is no materialism. But one cannot remain standing there. There is only an emancipation process, to come to individuation and not continue to hang on to the old collectives. So it was before Plato and Socrates. People let themselves be led by a high priest, by an authority. Materialism is a technique for liberating oneself from that... But then man awakens and stands as an individual and egotist who only thinks of himself. Now it is important that he come out of this isolation again, which was systematically taught him with the development of materialism in the West. How does he come out of this isolation? That is the next question. And it is not insoluble. It already lies in the essence of materialism, for those who understand materialism. One cannot condemn materialism. First one must see that materialism is an outstanding performance in humanitys development. One must establish that it is a one-sidedness; then one must characterize the one-sidedness as the most important one-sidedness in the course of history. Namely it is that which above all has made man an individual. It splits apart the whole collective, and then each man stands with his interests as a member of a group or as an individual, but at any rate, a free individual. Materialism contributed a great deal to the concept of “freedom”—that should also be known. Without materialism freedom is not possible. But doesn't materialism also depend on the chains which one should throw away after the process is completed? Yes, naturally, but the chain must be very precisely characterized. That is a concept of knowledge which came to its condition through the total development per reduction. You had apart from all this which is spiritual nature. VVhat refers to the consciousness, what refers to the soul, what refers to the emotions and what refers even to the principle of “life.' Everything has been reduced to the conformity of matter. There materialism agrees. There it is the genial methodology for analyzing matter and then building together again the concerned conformity of matter; so, for example, to develop out of it a highly developed technology. If this narrow concept of knowledge becomes limited as a cultural concept, the culture perishes because it is the principle of death. Materialism has worked out the principle of death. VVhen one looks upon this as a mystery, it is nothing more than a repetition of the mystery of Golgotha. At this point man is first incarnated. He lands on his feet on the earth and stands there firmly. Thus one can say: through materialism man first became an earth man. Before this he swung a little over it. He came down slowly and he stood strongly in the middle of the matter; then he had to get out of this conformity of the matter. But nothing such as spiritual.forces or high priests or druids could help him, he had to do it himself. Now man walks for himself and everything that will be made in the future and in the sense of expansion will be made out of such a conception of knowledge, must originate out of his own capability. 255

So, Beuys intention was to strive towards the creation of a “New society” He saw that one must start from the present—a present which for a growing number of people is becoming unbearable, hence causing them to search for an alternative to Western Capitalism or to State Capitalism. In his FU.I., Beuys himself was striving for something new: to create free and democratic socialism throughout the world. The ideas that led to Beuys's notion of a Dritter Weg drew upon the thought of Rudolf Steiner, who —as we will see in the Fourth Station—was a very attentive observer of social processes. In Munich, Steiner founded a Movement whose interests were not restricted solely to the political and economic but also embraced teaching. In 1919, he would claim: “Socialism is a theoretical requirement ... democracy is a historical requirement, as are liberalism, freedom and individualism. Humanity will not be able to go on much longer without organizing its social system upon a logic predicated on three main components: socialism via economics, democracy in state and law; freedom and individualism in one's spiritual life.” Thus for humanity to exist, certain conditions must be met: 1 Equality of Rights; democracy in the life of the State Beuys held that citizens were playing ever less part in the making of decisions; but humankind must understand that the working of the State also depends upon each one of them, because each is an irreplaceable part of that whole which is society.

2 Associative Socialism in the Economic Field Beuys's is an extended concept of the economy, in which each endeavour (including cultural endeavours) is considered as an economic enterprise. 3 Freedom in the Spiritual life Beuys illustrates this fundamental condition by reference to the example of education. He sees that only through a free education can one develop ideas that can compete freely with each other and thus develop; his comparison here is with the very best results of human creativity. Present-day structures of education tend to be centralized ... What we need is the administrative autonomy of schools ... (this is discussed in greater details below).

Now let's look at these three Beuysian prerequisites more closely. Beuys argued that humankind must understand that the greatest institutions were ideas themselves. He was not aiming to implement a programme of action but rather to build something new, in order to move beyond the existing state of affairs. Thus, the political system had to be improved. For Beuys, Socialism and Democracy could only be achieved if one's starting-point was the concept of freedom. And such a change could 256

only come about through a change in thinking. It was within thought that lay the core of the change which would generate the essential component of democracy—that is, “democracy” understood in the real sense of the term, as the power of the people, the direct participation of all citizens. For Beuys, a people that acts through delegation actually abandons its right to co-manage the public sphere. Instead, citizens should avail themselves fully of the power they possess—because it is absurd that a minority should be appointed to decide the fate of an entire nation. Beuys also believed that whilst the present system was being broken down, other affirmative forms of organization should come into being, with referendums becoming a real part of the action of deMocracy. In June 1989 Flash Art published an interview with Gunter Fòrg, one of the new generation of German artists. Speaking of Beuys, Forg said: “His political aims were ingenuous. But not his work. Of course, it may seem strange to say this when he himself claimed that his politics were part of his work ... | think of him as the most important artist of post-war Germany. His minimalist works with felt are extraordinary. At times he was influenced by American forms; but his ideas were profoundly German..." These word, | would argue, reveal a certain confusion. How can one distinguish between the work and the intention of the person creating it? How can one equivocate over the work of Beuys, when he dedicated his entire life to demonstrating its goals and purpose? One still hears far too often comments such as “Certainly, as far as the drawings go, we all agree... But his political ideas, etc.,' accompanied by an ironic smile. Reading Beuys's work in this way is the equivalent of performing a lobotomy upon it—that is, of rendering it totally useless. It contradicts all the aims and goals of his artistic praxis. I think | have demonstrated once and for all that if one does not consider this work as a whole—a complex whole—any judgement one offers will be without meaning. If we do not want to restrict to ourselves to merely reading the form of Beuys's art, then we must analyze the full implications of all its various aspects. And as confirmation of the spiritual and intellectual unity of this oeuvre, one might point out that Beuys sees a variety of political, economic and pedagogical themes all in terms of one fundamental concept: the free creativity which | have already referred to above. For Beuys, the sole natural order is that of the creativity which nature bestows upon all human beings. His Creed can be summarised in the exaltation of creativity as the “State of Nature” of the human mind. This is a creativity that is without limits or barriers; it is free to roam various heterogeneous territories, each one of which has its own extra-sensorial import. Creativity and art are envisaged as energy, as the fluid and mobile essence that makes itself following pages Difesa della Natura discussion, Bolognano, May 13, 1984

manifest in humanity, freeing humankind from any standardization,

from all pre-established pigeon-holing. Creativity is spontaneous and immediate, and art is the “politics of life.” 257

Mia

age

STSTTLIL ALIAALI

cut

IAT DIRI ABADA RZA BILE IT

e

\

0

+ alte in

i GLRLGA LIGA

Upui (0)

Di ALLE,

® È; È RI bi $ n

This all-embracing notion of creativity can be seen in what Beuys said at the Discussion of the Defence of Nature which was held in Bolognano on May 13, 1984, when the artist gave an extraordinary description of the free creativity that each individual possesses—a creativity whose full realization opens the way to the formation an organic society. Beuys: The entire idea of creativity is a question of everyone individual identity, a question of the identity of everyone on the face of the earth. And this means that the idea of creativity ceases to be simply a kind of slogan that tells us that people should be creative or can be creative. The only thing that each of us can do is to begin with the study of his or her own anthropological powers. We can already see that we have to do things on our own. We have to come to a clear idea of what it means to be a human being, and of what's most important for the development of human beings on this planet today, which is a question of freeing ourselves from all the dependencies of the past. This also means that we're approaching the point of having to assume full and complete responsibility for everything that we now undertake to do, whereas in older cultures, and even in the last century, people were accustomed to following the lines that were laid down by various authorities. Ve now have to face the realization that it's no longer possible simply to follow a leader, or a political ideology, or some kind of state authority, and that the time has come for us to begin to make full use of the most important of all of our powers, which in the power of creativity. And the most important part of creativity, or the realest part of the whole idea of creativity, is freedom, which of course has two sides to it. On the one hand you have freedom to act, and on the other hand, you are completely alone and have to employ the entirety of your power as an individual when you want to come closer to your brothers and sisters. You have to employ the entirety of your power as an individual whenever you want to communicate, and the revelation of the results of the ways in which you've exercised your freedom of action is more than simply a possibility that happens to be open to you. VVe have the duty to show what we've produced with our freedom. We have to become public and go out into the open and face up to everyone and show them what we have done, and we have to do this in full consciousness of the problem of freedom. Freedom means mostly the freedom of the other, it's not at all a question of ones own freedom, it's a question of the freedom of my brothers and my sisters or of my sisters and my brothers. So when | come out of my laboratory, or my workshop, or whatever |want to call the place where | am trying to produce something or to get something done or to effect a collaboration with other people as a whole community of workers, | can't simply declare that you have to believe in what | have done, or that what | have done is a quality product simply because it happens to be my product; | can't even declare that it has any particular qualities at all. All | can do is to take advantage of 262

the possibility or to accept the duty of showing people what | have done, and then | have to ask them whether or not it's useful. And If we were to begin to make use of or to practice this kind of technique, we'd very soon find ourselves capable of being truly productive, and in fact much more productive, hundreds and thousands of times more productive than anything we find now in the organized labour of capitalistic enterprise or in the state-organized labour of centralized communistic enterprise. When we have the awareness of cooperating together as free individuals, we are also much closer to the creation of a real and concrete democracy, because democratic structures have to be a result of free thought and of our equality as thinking individuals, which is the basis on which we can then construct a constitution. Ve can be much more productive than we are, and we can also move off to acquiring a much clearer consciousness of ourselves, which is the same as saying that we can come to full consciousness of what creativity really means. Creativity, moreover, can't be thought of as something single and monolithic; it's something that's highly diversified and that has to be studied from a variety of points of view and in terms of several realities. Ve begin to come a great deal closer to a well-diversified understanding of the human being as consisting of a number of extremely different elements of creativity, and we begin actually to approach these various strata of creativity. Creativity is a question of the possibility of thinking, or we might say of thinking power, and it's also a question of the level of the creativity of the feelings. When we talk about the powers of thought, we immediately make reference to our heads and to the brain, and when we talk about feeling, we're referring to the region of the heart and the parts of the body around it, and in this way we've already begun to talk about two parts of a complex organism. But it's also logical to continue and to talk about the driving power or general energies that sustain both these levels that l've already mentioned, and here were closer to talking about the whole machinery of energy that consists of the creativity of the will, or of will power. What | am saying in terms of the way in which human beings are organized and function as organisms, leads us to acknowledge that there are three differ ent levels of creativity and that we cannot avoid examining them all. Once we adopt this practice, we immediately feel like taking the first step and elaborating and considering phenomena in the context of an attempt to distinguish the organic entireties which they contain. We can also see that a tree is crucially connected with these reflections as it too consists of different levels or strata of creativity. As we talk of tripartite human creativity, consisting of the power to think, feel and want, we can observe the existence of similar strata in a tree with its leaves as a crown, its trunk, and its roots. And at this point we are close to a clear understanding of the way in which these activities (all of which derive from a wide concept of art which subsequently extends to working in society and in nature) cannot be measured with the same yardstick applied to forms of action which are only symbolic: they are grappling instead with truths which are 263

part of the very meaning of reality, and they enable us to see the way in which the culture of the past affects not only us, but also nature itself. Cultures of the past drew closer, closer, and closer to a sort of critical point, a crisis point, at which the final part of their methodology for the development of the nature of the human species (in the aspect of our ability for concentrated thought) could only end in that collapse which leads into the straits of an entirely materialistic under standing of the world, in which there is no longer any appreciation of the whole reality of what exists, as the central truth for every reality. It allows for only a single and highly specialized methodology for the utilization of the dead and physical aspect of the world, of the physical and mathematical aspect of the world, and its only object is the exploitation of the world and the possibility of digging out everything which can be extracted from it, and all to the exclusive benefit of what we might term a sort of selfish profit. We might also realize that what leads to what we can be termed the final crisis—the simultaneous destruction of the human species and of nature, another result of this materialist vision of the world—is a social order which reflects this type of structuring which is no longer able to solve the problems existing within it. lt follows therefore, and quite logically, that our task is to discover a new form of social order which would be able to put into effect a different use of human faculties, of human work and productive power, and which can go beyond the way in which these forces are organized and utilized both in private capitalism and in centralized and state-controlled communism. And it is because of this that, together with those who are working with me in this attempt to reach an alternative at a higher level of the ordering of society, we have seen it necessary to begin with the elaboration and implementation of a series of real models...

These comments offer rich food for thought. They may be off-thecuff, yet they express some very precise concepts, which one might summarise in seven points:

1 The concept of creativity is closely grafted into the nature of all human beings; and it carries with it a profound implication of freedom. 2 There are two aspects to the concept of liberty. The first concerns the individual, who is free to do what he wants; the second, and more important, concerns interpersonal relations—that is, making available to others the fruits of our own free actions. This leads to the third phase of freedom as envisaged by Beuys.

3 Communication is understood as fundamental to any social relations and covers all the field of creativity. Beuys sees this as implying more than one possibility. We have a duty to show that which we have produced through the exercise of our freedom. 264

4 An individual’s creativity is exercised mains: thought, feeling and will. The Theory of Sculpture is clear. We might constitutes the implementation of that

in three main doecho here of the say that creativity theory.

5 Creativity is not an exclusively human privilege. In another context a tree might, for example, have its own specific energies within the domains of thought, feeling and will.

6 A criticism of materialism, which is seen as the fruit of a unilateral development of the powers of thought. Materialism fails to recognize the other vital aspects of human and natural creativity. 7 The need to remedy all of this, searching out an alternative to both Capitalism and Communism. This implies a need to develop real models that propose a course for society that will allow for the full realization and expression of human faculties. These seven points encapsulate the approach that Beuys took to the social problems of humankind, to the relations between politics and economics and a valid educational system. But let us look now at the initiatives in which Beuys gave expression to this approach. The first dates back to 1967 and involved the foundation of the German Student Party within the Dusseldorf Academy of Fine Arts, in spite of the fact that the Director of the institution had forbidden “political assemblies.” The aim was to educate each individual in the employment of freedom, so that each citizen would play a direct role in political processes, making all forms of political party superfluous. Johannes StUttgen, a Beuys student at the time, recalls:

“On June 22, 1967 at 4:00 p.m. under the chairmanship of Professor Joseph Beuys, the introductory meeting of the German Student Party took place in Dusseldorf. The necessity of this new party, whose most important goal is the education of all men to a spiritual majority, is expressly to combat the acute threat of conceptionless politics that are oriented by materialism and the stagnation linked to it. Hence questions according to such an existing programme within the evil political framework must be rejected. The party that admits to a statute in its pure form and basically occurs for man's rights, of whose hypothesis it sees in the unlimited readiness of man for the realization of his duties, works for the necessary expansion of consciousness by spiritual, reaonsable methods, thus progressively and humanly, and therefore stresses the radicalness of its demands according to the fundamental renovation of all traditional forms in the life and thought 265

of man. Real discussion will be—as Beuys says—necessary, but only possible on a spiritual, artistic level. Only in the battle of ideas are democracy and sincere human deeds accomplished. Utilitarian, merely economically determined goals and their egotism must be superceded by the artistic demands of the moment and, along with history, must finally be torn down.’ Beuys's political involvement was the result of an inevitable conver gence of interests: as an artist his focus was on the development of human freedom and creativity; as a teacher his attention had, since 1961, been drawn to the growing political avvareness of students—an awareness which, in a certain sense, he took it upon himself to express. The concrete aims of the German Student Party were: 1. Total Disarmament 2. A United Europe 3. Self-administration of Law, Culture and Economics as autonomous entities 4. The Development of New Criteria of Education, Teaching and Research 5. Détente between mutually-dependent East and West On March 2, 1970 Beuys founded the Organization for Non-Voters and for Free Referendum, with an office in the centre of DUsseldorf.

Beuys:... Never Vote for a Party! Everyone! Each one!

Vote for Art — that is, Yourselves! ...In retrospect the students’ movement was characterized by the domination of ideology at the expense of Unity in Diversity. Groups were split and divided by ideological differences, and a solid basis for the participation of large numbers of people was not possible. Many groups, particularly Marxists, had difficulty in understanding our insistence on the widened concept of art, freedom and creativity as an anthropological and phenomenological system. The mood then was charged with emotion, and things were done hastily, so discussion of differences was impossible; hence my conviction that the idea of “permanent conference” is essential. Vvith his refusal to align himself with either Left or Right, Beuys's political attitude was clearly atypical; he believed that only through continuous comparison of different ideas and experiences could one achieve that “Unity in Diversity” which he saw as marking a true achievement of democracy.

Beuys: For me, being left-wing does not really mean that much. The Left is not an actual value for me. After the disappearance of the bourgeoisie (thank God!), the very ideologies of that bourgeoisie crumble—including the layout of its parliament, with those on the left, on the right, or in the centre. And this means that so-called “parliamentarianism” is called into doubt. The concept of “the left” Is a question of sitting plans. 266

On June 1, 1971 came the foundation the Organization for Direct Democracy through Referendums.The essential points were: 1. Political structure determined from the bottom upwards 2. Total sovereignty of the people at all levels of the administration 3. A Constitution created by the people 4. Men and women without party membership cards should have exactly the same rights as card-carrying members of the legislative bodies 5. No privileges for the individual representatives of the people or for state employees 6. Popular vetoes in individual cases 7. Respect of the will of electors by those for who are elected 8. Referendums on important issues and on basic questions of legislation 9. Possibility of removing unworthy or incompetent representa tives from office It should be noted that when Beuys uses the term “people” he is not using it to refer to a particular social class; the term simply means “the majority," as is the norm in any democracy. This organization almed to develop a concept based upon Rudolph Steiner's three structures—an aspect that has already been referred to and which is developed further in the Chapter Three. Beuys stressed the concept of “direct democracy; claiming that throughout history no real democracy had ever existed. Parliamentary democracy was only an illusion. The elected representatives within such a system did not really represent the people but rather particular interest groups; at best, they limited themselves to interceding on behalf of the will of the electors. Truly democratic structures, on the other hand, should be social necessities that arise from human freedom exercised under the control of law. Beuys never saw freedom as an infinite value that can degener ate into the mere arbitrary. Instead, freedom was a good that humankind invests within certain structures. In this sense, man places himself in a position in which he is dependent with regard to the Constitution that he himself has created. In its actions and writings, the Organization for Direct Democracy and for Free Referendums aimed to work towards the establishment of a form of administration that was entirely determined by the majority, with the process of the referendum being seen as the means to achieve this end. To propagate its ideas, the Organization set up an office in Dùsseldorf—a sort of democracy information site, where study groups worked upon various fields (education, economics, legislation). Beuys: At the beginning the work of the organization was, to be sure, stalled, but then it began to run and its initiatives became broader. The organization is a sort of model pedagogical organ which constantly tests its work and displays practical proof.

We must work from the basis of the fundamental law and the coun267

try!s constitution and can move only within the limits of legality in that we attempt to put forth new viewpoints and perspectives without overstepping legal bounds. The organization builds on a material that can only be comprehended organizationally. The concept of art will be anthropologically expanded as a social architecture, created by many people. The Organization was legally recognized as an Association. However, its aims were very different to those of a political party, the goal being solely to make people aware of their own creativity, of the fact that all people are artists. Such a goal could only be fully achieved if people learned to cooperate, to work together in har mony—thus working in an “organization” in the true sense of the word, in a body that strove for the formation of the Social Organism. The same striving to awaken political awareness can be seen in Beuys's participation in Documenta V in 1972, when the entire Of fice for the Organization for Direct Democracy through Free Referendums was transferred to the event. For one hundred days Beuys discussed his political ideas —his view of the world and his new concept of art—with people from various cultural, economic and social backgrounds. Individual artistic expression and social actions were now part and parcel of the same thing. The principle guidelines of all Beuys's work might be seen in the two notions “Everyone is an Artist" and "Everything is Political.‘ Everyone has within them the possibility to create something, perhaps an image or sculpture, perhaps institutions as a whole. In his own actions and life, each person can work towards the construction of the Socia/ Organism as a Work ofArt, in a process that Beuys called Sozial plastik. Thus the discipline of art becomes a universal patrimony of humankind, the free sculpting of a free democratic society. Beuys: / have come to the conclusion that there is no other possibility to do something for man other than through art. And to do this I need an educational concept; | need a conception of perception theory, and | must negotiate. Thus there are three things that belong under one roof. The educational concept refers to the fact that man Is a creative being; it is very important to make him conscious of that: to create an awareness of the fact that he is a creative being and a free being and that for these reasons he must inevitably behave in an antiauthoritarian fashion. The conception of perception theory confirms that only the creative man can change history, can use his creativity in a revolutionary way. To go back one step to my educational concept, it would mean: ART EQUALS CREATIVITY EQUALS HUMAN FREEDOM... the transformation of the social situation as it is now and how it repressively affects mankind,

which we call the majority of the workers or the proletariat, is under consideration at this moment. All of these things belong to my educational concept, in order for it to function practically and politically. We inform people about the current situation and about the path which is accessible to organize and account for it. In order to make 268

people fit for this principle of free referendum and self-determination, we must organize them into a position of power, so that one day they can stand in concurrence, for example, to undertake the party state or formal democracy. All executive power should come from the people, but how this is possible is what we teach and at the same time organize. When the majority of men have agreed that there is only one way, for example, to change the fundamental law, then they will simply proceed to a referendum. They will say “we have recognized that it no longer makes sense to delegate our voice to a man who as a party politician has nothing more in mind than to take seriously only the interests of his party. We do not want to delegate any more men, we do not want any representatives or formal democracy, we want to determine ourselves now, and we want to proceed to a referendum over the issue of means of production,” for example, that is the pressing point... When the majority decides that, then it is valid as law. Or the few who hold power destroy their credibility as democrats. Those who hold power today want democracy, or so they say. Then they will very simply experience that they must take seriously the fact that the majority has created a law against which they transgress. And then the so-called executive power of the people is employed, passes the law, and transgression is no longer possible. In 1972 Beuys would—in collaboration with the Nobel-prize winner Heinrich Béll—draw up the project for the foundation of a Free College. As we know, this project was followed in 1974 by the foundation of the Free International University (F1.U.), whose manifesto was drawn up by the two men. Established as a centre for research, enterprise and the communication of ideas, the FI.U. is now active in a number of countries: Germany, England, Belgium, Italy, Ireland and the USA (in 2008 Bolognano hosted the Third Free International Forum). The FI.U. is a non-profit-making body that exists to generate proposals and ideas within regard to the future development of society. Beuys was striving for a new notion of social order, within which human faculties, and the human capacity for work and production, could be put to new and fuller use. Alongside the central problem of creativity— and of its full achievement within a genuinely democratic environment—another issue was that of the need for institutions that educate (or rather re-educate) people to approach art as a profession of freedom. We will look later at Beuys's concern with teaching. What is interest ing to note here is his growing awareness of the actual or possible destabilizing effects of certain socially important factors, including the phenomena of foreign immigration into industrialized (that is, rich) nations and crime (a true scourge of contemporary society). The manifesto reads: “The founders of the school look for creative 269

stimulation from foreigners working here. This is not to say that it is a prerequisite that we learn from them or that they learn from us. Their cultural traditions and way of life call forth an exchange of creativity that must go beyond preoccupation with varying art forms to a comparison of the structures, formulations and verbal expressions of the material pillars of social life: law, economics, science, religion, and then move on to the investigation or exploration of the ‘creativity of the democratic. The creativity of the democratic is increasingly discouraged by the progress of bureaucracy, coupled with the aggressive proliferation of an international mass culture. Political creativity is being reduced to the mere delegation of decision and power. The imposition of an international cultural and economic dictatorship by the constantly expanding combines leads to a loss of articulation, learning and the quality of verbal expression. In the consumer society, where creativity, imagination and intelligence are not articulated, and their expression is prevented, they become defective, harmful and damaging—in contrast to a democratic society—and find outlets in corrupted criminal creativity. Criminality can arise from boredom, from unarticulated creativity. To be reduced to consumer values, to see democratic potential reduced to the occasional election, this can also be regarded as a rejection or a dismissal of democratic creativity. Environmental pollution advances parallel with a pollution of the world within us. Hope is denounced as Utopian or as illusory, and discarded hope breeds violence. In the school we shall research into the numerous forms of violence, which are by no means confined to weapons or physical force. As a forum for the confrontation of political or social opponents the school can set up a permanent seminar on social behaviour and its articulate expression.

With regard to this, Beuys found practical application for these ideas at the Documenta VI in 1977. Members and supporters of the various branches the EI.U. worldwide met to discuss the most pressing problems and issues which required an interdisciplinary approach. The discussions developed over thirteen meetings, which might be summarized as follows: 1. Discussion of the Periphery—that is, of the future of small countries and those areas of society which have no real access to political power. 2. Discussion of nuclear energy and alternative energies. The issue had become enormously important in West Germany, where the Greens were beginning to gain a following which would increase over time. Forms of alternative energy were proposed, which would not see all power concentrated in the hands of the State. 3. Discussion of Community. Accounts of experiences of cooperation and self-determination. 270

Interior of Fridericiamum Museum, Conferenza Permanente, 100

days of discussion. Documenta VI, Kassel 1977

. First discussion of the media: manipulation. The influence exerted by private interest groups and by the State. . Second discussion of the media: alternatives. Limited circulation press, development of cable TV and “pirate” radio; films independent of multinational distribution chains. . Week of Human Rights. A discussion of CHARTA ‘77 and other issues relating to human rights, both in the East and the West. . Discussion of urban decay and institutions—that is, the problems Capitalism has created within cities, and the issue of improvements to such institutions as prisons, mental hospitals, schools, etc. . Discussion of Immigration. This was linked with the former and underlined the needs to restore trust, self-identity and work in those countries from which the flow of emigration was most substantial. . Discussion of Northern Ireland. An attempt to examine the true causes of the problem.

10. Discussion of transformation models, compared to the models of repression applied throughout the world. 11. Discussion of violent behaviour—above all as linked to those years of urban terrorism. 12. Discussion of work and unemployment. A _demonstration that the roots of unemployment were to be found in the capitalist mechanisms motivated solely by profit. 13. Thirteenth discussion. An analysis of 100 days of discussions. Joseph Beuys hoped that all men might achieve equality of rights and freedom. And | myself would like to add here that he dedicated himself to: A new form of market economy, to an organic ordering of the econOMY; A practical change in the concept of money; Social organization based upon the right to work.

Joseph Beuys and Lucrezia De Domizio during the Conferenza Permanente, Documenta VI, Kassel 1977

Here | think it is Important to underline the prophetic importance of the artist-shaman Joseph Beuys, whose ideas foresaw the social needs of the present. The German artist was the precursor of those who strive to resolve all the economic, environmental, political and cultural problems that, now more than ever, beset humankind and cause divisions within our planet. One can thus see the range of action that Beuys envisaged for his initiatives and work groups. In each instance, he was inspired by a desire to obtain the widest possible understanding of the problems facing the social existence of contemporary humanity. During the 1970s Beuys was indefatigable in his determination to reach as many people as possible. There were public debates, conferences, art events and publications—all envisaged by Beuys as part of a “Permanent Conference" which, for once and for all, was to centre upon the focal issue of humankind itself. Certainly, in all of this he was helped by the structure of the FI.U.— an organization which is finally beginning to bear fruit, with groups active in various cities in Germany, Italy, England, Ireland and the United States. Beuys himself would define the FI.U. as “an open arena ... a Permanent Conference” An anti-institutional organization, this was a body for interdisciplinary discussion and exploration, striving to revive both physical and psychological research into the world. This was the goal that Beuys saw for the Organization for Direct Democracy and for the Free International University. He believed that both of these bodies were the fruit of a process of development which had begun with Fluxus. The new “pedagogical” instruments were means for the circulation of information and for the implementation of action. They would generate notions that would make it possible to see how the concept of art might be applied to change the existing system of capitalism into a free democratic system (or, at the very least, into systems based upon the notion of fraternity). 273

This and this alone was the goal of the Organization for Direct Democracy and of the Free International University. The FI.U. is not a political movement based upon a fixed ideology. Far from it! lt is an anthropological movement that strives to under stand social problems in order to intervene and open the way for the steps necessary to achieve a better future for humankind. ... The FI.U. sees no restriction on its field of intervention: the term “free” that forms part of its very name is a concept of essential importance to the future. Beuys also saw that the concept of international cooperation was also indispensable, as is the concept of “University, which coordi nates the two concepts (“free” and “international”), opening the way to a world of free and new international cooperation. For Beuys, the FI.U. embodied the concept of a new order of society. lts starting-point was the free initiative of self-determining individuals who, working in cooperation with other such individuals, would develop and implement the Theory of a new Social Development. It should be pointed out that the FI.U. is not a State university; it is not a State-run enterprise (in either economic or cultural terms). Indeed, the FI.U. —and thus Beuys himself—oppose the transformation of Culture into State Property—just as they oppose the transformation of industry into State property. Beuys held—and here one should remember the period in which he was living—that economic life in the West had been transformed into State property, in that the important enterprises which were engaged in the production of abilities, knowledge and creativity were indoctrinated, managed and organized by the powers of the State. Thus he argued the pressing need for a “denationalization” of cultural life... and this change is extremely urgent.

274

When the majority ofmen have agreed that there is only one way, for example, to change the fundamental law,

then they will simply proceed to a referendum. They will say “we have recognized that it no longer makes sense to delegate our voice to a man who as a party politician has nothing more in mind than to take

seriously only the interests of his par

IREse (Joseph Beuys)

From what Beuys says one can see that the FI.U. is the supreme Invisible Sculpture, created in Defence of Human

Rights for a new

democratic order. A new type of democracy and a new type of freedom would find expression in free international cooperation to safeguard Nature, to defend humankind, human values and creativity. As we have seen in the first chapter,

1978 saw the publication of

the FI.U. document Aktion Dritter Weg, which is of fundamental importance to an understanding of Beuys's economic ideas (it will be discussed in greater detail in the Fifth Station). The following year Beuys alone published his document Appeal for the Alternative (discussed in the Second Station). Essentially, as already mentioned, there are three main points to this Appeal. Let us now analyze these in greater detail, starting with what Beuys himself had to say on the matter: The first gives a general picture of the symptoms of a crisis long present in our society and which according to Beuys stem from the forms of Capitalism and Communism.

Beuys: Although clear differences do exist between western and eastern capitalism, e.g. with regard to respect for human rights, it is nevertheless true that both systems are tending increasingly towards destructiveness, and that, through their opposing powers, they threaten the future of mankind in the extreme. For this reason, it js time that “both be replaced by a new principle,” since both are “on their last legs." Among us, too, this can only be done by a change in the constitution. The practically neurotic loyalty to the Basic Law which has developed in the interim makes us blind and incapable in face of the necessity of developing its rudiments further. In a society that has attained a certain level of democratic development, why, in fact, should requisite further development not be openly discussed? Already, far too many are afraid that they may fall under the suspicion of being enemies of the constitution. They deny themselves even creative ideas on how to extend the concepts of justice once these have been formalized, if the progress of conscience demands it. And it does. However, Beuys's sharpest insights come when he discusses the “inner” crisis—the “crisis of awareness and feeling”

Beuys: Most people feel that they are at the mercy of the circumstances in which they find themselves. This leads, in turn, to the destruction of the inner self. These people can no longer see the meaning of life within the destructive processes to which they are subject, in the complex tangle of state and economic power, in the diverting, distracting manoeuvres of a cheap entertainment industry. Young people especially are lapsing into alcoholism and drug addiction, and are committing suicide in increasing numbers. Hun278

dreds of thousands become victims of fanatics disguised as religious people. The opposite of this loss of identity of the personality is the motto: ‘After me the deluge"—the reckless “living it up,” the pursuit of instant gratification, a glib conformation in order to take, at least for oneself. what there is to get from the total senselessness, as long as life lasts, without considering who has to pay the bill. His second point is an insistence on the need for a new “turninginwards," a reacquisition of the intellectual independence that allows us to take a new and radical look at reality, and—even more importantly—allows ideas to work their internal revolution within us. As he says, the only true revolution is the revolution of ideas. And it is that internal revolution which can lead on to an evolution and development within the field of humankind's social behaviour. Beuys: Only when we have effected a “revolution of concepts," by re-thinking the basic relationships within the social organism, will the way be open for an evolution without force and arbitrariness. Unfortunately, the attitude that concepts are “not the point” still lives on; often precisely in those circles that think in political alter natives. This flippant preconception must be overcome if the new social movement is to be effective and become a political force. Concepts always involve a farreaching set of practices, and the way in which a situation is thought about is decisive for how it is handled—and before this, how and whether the situation is understood at all. Thus Beuys sees the clear mistake made by all those who resort to violence in order to change the system.

Beuys: VVhoever says that a change is necessary, but skips over the “revolution of concepts” and attacks only the external manifestations of the ideologies, will fail. He will elther resign, content himself with reforming, or end up in the dead-end street of terrorism. All three are forms of the victory of the systems strategy. Thus the use of any kind of force constitutes an expression of behaviour that conforms to the system, i.e. that reinforces what it wants to dissolve. This appeal is an encouragement and exhortation to go the way of the non-violent transformation. Those who have been passive so far, although filled with uneasiness and dissatisfaction, are called upon to BECOME ACTIVE. Your activity is perhaps the only thing which can lead those who are active, but are flirting with the tools of violence, or who already use violence, back to the route of nonviolent action. previous pages Joseph Beuys signing an edition of 7000 oaks, Palazzo Durini, May 12,

1984

I would argue that confirmation of what Beuys says—and of the continuing, every growing, validity of his arguments—can be seen in the answer which Piero Gilardi gave in an interview published in 279

the Italian newspaper // Sole 24 Ore on March 5, 1989. As will be remembered, Gilardi—vwho had been an exponent of Arte Povera— had previously abandoned art in the 1970s to engage more fully in radical politics. Interviewer: “After so many years of engagement in left-wing politics, how do you judge the relationship between art and ideology now that you have returned to the practice of art?” Piero Gilardi: “I think that up to the Impressionists—to just before the “historical” avant-garde movements—art was an expression of the dominant ideologies. But then ideology revealed itself to be a tran—and | intend that observation as a self-criticism. Ideology is a trap because it binds you; it gives the illusion of possessing a truth. And that definitely conflicts with the idea of art that | hold nowadays. | think that art is, in fact, the sole activity that can allow people to enter into contact with each other, that can induce them to live together in diversity. And that is a problem which is becoming urgent. It is precisely this notion of “unity in diversity" —that is, the type of cooperation to which Gilardi refers—which Beuys saw as of fundamental importance for anyone who was serious about engagement in truly alternative action. This, in fact, is the third point in his Appeal: Beuys: /n reality, there are alternative concepts and initiatives that are Marxistic, Catholic, protestant, liberal, anthroposophical, ecological, etc. In many essential points they already agree to a large extent. This is the basis of SOLIDARITY IN THE UNIT. In other areas, there is disagreement. This is the basis of frEEDOM WITHIN THE UNIT. A joint electoral initiative of the total alternative movement is only realistic in the form of an ALLIANCE of many autonomous groups, whose relationship among themselves and towards the public is defined by a spirit of ACTIVE TOLERANCE. These were probably the reasons which—in the late 1970s/early 1980s—led to Beuys's interest in the new Green Movement, because he saw that—finally—there was a chance to express ideas that were not bound within any form of ideology. He would speak of his activity within the Green Movement in a discussion with Pierre Restany in 1980 (the entire interview is quoted in Chapter Five). Pierre Restany: “.. Do you feel yourself bound in some way to take your social activity further, to perhaps create new types of social entities or organizations, as you did in the past?”

Joseph Beuys: / am obliged to continue an important task within the Ecological Movement, which in Germany is called the Green Party. And | must continue until the next federal elections, at least. 280

Joseph Beuys with Lucrezia De Domizio. Diary of Seychelles operation, Praslin, December 1980

Restany: “Will you be a candidate?”

Beuys: Perhaps. A person can put himself on the list to be elected. But this depends upon what the union base wants. | cannot say to people “| will do it” or “| must be the one to do it No. It is the people themselves who decide who will do the job. However, whoever is elected, my job is to work for a positive result for this social movement, the Green Party. Thus my efforts tend towards this goal: to reach and go beyond the 5-6% threshold, as has happened in France.

Restany: “So you think this ‘green movement’ has a good chance of success? We were surprised by the results in the provincial elections—do you think people are becoming more aware?” Beuys: Yes, there is more awareness. | mean, people are becoming more aware of. responsive to, the goals that the Green Movement has set itself: the need for a change in social structure in order to achieve new structures for culture, for democracy and for economic life. You can already see that a lot of people are getting involved, to make themselves felt as a presence in society. In two provinces—in the north and southt—we almost reached 5%, though only actually getting 3%. However, 3% of the votes is still a lot, especially in a zone where most people work in industry. Here in North Westphalia, more than in the south, the workers are facing particular problems. So we managed to involve 300,000 people, who voted for the Green Party. A very large number of people. WVe can hope to make progress In the next electoral campaign in October. But even if we do not go beyond the 5% threshold, for myself and all those involved, this is a very important task. Yes, even if we do not get beyond that percentage, because—as | said—l think this is very important work. One has to work against the consolidated power blocks. In Ger many, every political partyr—Social Democrats, Liberals, Christian Democrats—are in effect nothing but a single power block. Each party is pursuing the same principles. Each party! We have to struggle against that dominant power block... and the Green Party is the sole real opposition. Restany: “Do you think your contribution will be of the ‘classic’ type—l mean, classic involvement in the organization of debates, in canvassing to get votes—or are you thinking of a more, shall we say, particular action; the construction of a special artistic/political front for the elections?” Beuys: Yes, we have already tried to find new activities in the streets: some kind of actions. VVe have done this, in the past and we will also do it in the future. But the most important thing is to go into the universities and to spell out very clearly, and from a scientific point of view, the theory of the thing. So that also the people with a very materialistic understanding of science, and who have a need for finding a rationalization of the thing and a clear analysis of the thing, may know more and more that this theory which works 282

within the Green movement—more clear or less clear in this part of the Green movement, more or less in other parts—that this theory becomes more and more clearly the only possible available theory for transforming the social order. So very recently, in the past three weeks, | invited here an important person from East Germany to make clear just what his criticism of communist thinking is; and | made clear what my criticism is of Western private capitalism. lt became clear that we had in common the same characteristic principles of innovation and of working with ideas and with art and creativity. So let us say that there are the same ideas for living for everybody, and that is the starting point for every other problem in this society. You see? The idea of freedom, the idea of art, the idea of self-determination, the idea of creativity: these are the points from which we start, you know. This is, for all of us, the organic starting point. And so we showed very clearly the difference between Marxist thought and the new thought; we showed how we are trying to draw away from the bad positions within Marxist thought. And in this way we came to a new kind of philosophy. Yet things went rather differently: like all other political parties, the Green Party too would, in Beuys's opinion, be a failure. This is what he had to say on the matter in 1984: Beuys: As soon as a free movement becomes a political party and enters a national parliament, it immediately tends to become an entirely normal political party like all the rest of them. | find, in fact, that l'm quite often in opposition to their actions and ideas. It happens quite frequently that | can't see any difference between what they want to do and what the Social Democratic party wants to do. Before the moment in which they became a party, which is to talk about that time at which the green movement was still only a movement, | found them much more closely connected to the line of the Free International University that l've been trying to describe to you today. The Green political party is already something that we have to try to improve, and | think thats still a possibility. | don't see things pessimistically, but at the same time, | don't have any reason to be particularly optimistic. Possibilities, in any case, still remain open, and this is a road we can attempt to travel by attempting to make a contribution of fresher and more important ideas. In the later part of his life, Beuys saw the very concept of politics as practically pointless. Any project that was nurtured within the obsolete matrix of politics would never bear real fruit. And this was doubly true of the Greens, whose ranks were now flooded with people who had previously been involved with other political groups (primarily on the left) and who—under “the green banner of ecology” which had such public appeal—continued to pursue their old demagogical politics. The curious thing is that this course of events can now, thirty years later, be seen in the green parties of almost all countries, particularly in Italy. 283

As far as Beuys was concerned, the very concept of “politics” had become redundant; it was an integral part of a system that contemporary humankind had to change once and for all. Beuys: When | was already fully engaged in my professional activitv—| am deliberately setting aside here any sort of practical or theoretical engagement in politics, because | am convinced that it is something ever more ruinous and pointless—I founded an organization that worked for direct democracy, taking into account the life and death, the victories and defeats, the collapse of rebirth y is, of our country. However, in this, the links to democracthat the Rights of Man—seemed to be too unilateral an approach. What is essential is an organic starting-point, the source to which | have already referred in talking about the language within which we can refresh ourselves and from which can arise not only thought and knowledge but also our awareness of Self. Hence, | thought it essential to identify that core of freedom which derives from growing self-fawareness, in an experiment defined Free International University. Later, as a member of this organization, | was one of the founders of the Greens— that is, the party of the eco-pacifists. One needs only cite that movement to make it clear that often things are—or must be—-experimental in character. Now, | do not want to comment at all on what the Greens are doing now. | merely repeat that | find the very concept of politics ever more impossible to accept... For everything that | have to say there is no point in dragging in the concept of politics. The most interesting evidence with regard to what Beuys is saying here, comes perhaps from his pupil and assistant Klaus Staeck: “When the Greens—that is, the environmentalists—first came onto the scene, he believed they embodied a great hope. However, Beuys couldn't—or wouldn't—be an easy partner for the Party which was about to take its place within the structure of Parliament, just like all the other parties. All of those who nowadays boast that Beuys was at their side do not realize what the truth was. Beuys was again following his path; he was again engaged in active research. lf there was ever someone who did not tolerate restrictions upon his ability to move about, that was Beuys. Thus, after having spent a large part of his life in devising, organizing and nurturing organizations that may appear to be inspired by a political intent, Beuys got to a point where he threw over the very idea of politics, exploring instead the true dimensions of human life: the economic dimension, the cultural dimension and, first and foremost, the role that teaching had to play in all this. He explained this conception of things very clearly in a discussion that took place in Vienna in 1983.

Beuys: / will make some observations with regard to the concept of politics. 284

I came to question the concept of politics because it has grown stronger and stronger in all the fields of human production, in a process which | have referred to as “infeltification’—a turning to felt. Concepts such as self-administration, real democracy, a new system of capital and credit within the economy are all concerned with the society of the future; and at the level of content, it makes no sense to “line” them with politics. | am referring here to concepts that bear no relation to reality as it is—for example, “cultural poli tics.' Such a term should not even exist. It implies that the State should exercise culture—which, in effect, it does, given that there are schools, etc. which are State enterprises. Second point: People talk about economic policy and politics, and that too is a concept that is Meaningless, because the very interests of the State are falsified within the economy itself by the fact that the State becomes an “entrepreneur.” Thus one can see examples of “infeltification,’ with concepts becoming duplicated, applied to each other as facing and lining. ... On the one hand, we have the life of the State, on the other the life of the Economy; and in both of these fields, politics has no role to play. The right field for politics would be a State which stands as the guarantor for the maintenance of legislative, executive and judicial powers. lf that was the case—if the State limited itself to defending and exercising the rights acquired by democratic man—then everything would be fine. Then one could begin to work with this concept. One could say: “This is the political institution, the concern of the State; this is the free life of the Spirit which runs itself. There would be a principle of self-administration, an economy of solidarity that worked to the benefit of all ... | want to say again why | aim to attack the very concept of politics, to the point that | support the radical claim that such a concept should not even exist. The concept of politics is closely bound up with the concept of the bourgeoisie. VWVe are still living an era that is the direct descendant of the French Revolution, thus an era of the revolution of the bourgeois classes. And the concept of politics undoubtedly suits such a class. But this is the era that we want to rupture; we do not want the bourgeois, we want Man. We want a new humanity, a humanity without classes. This is my concept of humanity. So these were the concepts within which Beuys intended to work: economy and culture (or, rather, a correct approach to culture thanks to action that was genuinely educational). One can therefore claim that Beuys saw sociology as an interdisciplinary subject, which could have a lot of goals in common with Art. This is why, as we shall see, education had to embrace anthropology; it had to provide men with the knowledge necessary to respond to the needs of society. \WVith regard to the importance of teaching, this will become clear 285

when we look at the years Beuys spent as a Professor of Sculpture at the Dusseldorf Academy of Fine Arts. But now let us examine why, from the mid 1970s onwards, Beuys took an increasing interest in economic problems. Beuys: / am more and more convinced that the major problem of time today must be searched for in the area of economics, and not in that of culture, meaning by this in the productive area, where the manufacturing, distribution and consumption of products all comes about. The cultural area must be organically integrated into this process of circulation. Unfortunately, however, the economy and culture today are completely separate from each other.

For Beuys, Culture and Economy were closely bound up with each other: humankind's productive actions and capacities were, fundamentally, cultural phenomena. In the same way, all the various aspects of the economic world—the organization and function of its various structures—should not be considered the preserve of mere specialists. Instead, such matters were to be seen in relation to the life of one and all; they are part of a univer sal cultural patrimony. Let us look at the economic problems that Beuys posited. The FI.U. investigated all sectors of the existing world in which one could see radical changes. Economic problems were the focus of the already-cited Aktion Dritter WVeg, which was published by the FI.U. in 1978 with the subtitle “Promotional Initiative. Idea and Practical Attempt at Producing an Alternative to Existing Social Systems in the West and East” Beuys's appeal was addressed to the whole of humanity; encouraging people to undertake a process of change that would overcome all restrictions. The real world had to be reformed on new ethical, economic and political bases. In looking at the multiple aspects of reality and the numerous different spheres of human life, Beuys's Aktion Dritter Weg identified the symptoms of a general crisis of awareness to be seen In the scientific, ecological and economic fields, as well as in each individual. This crisis could be overcome through dialogue—and the means for making that dialogue effective and ongoing was the Free International University, working together with the Action for the Reconstruction of the Third Way. Through work and labour, man performs a function in the world—a function of communication and collaboration. According to Beuys, the fact that we can no longer establish the identity or extent of individual contributions in the creation of a specific product means that there can be no genuine qualitative criteria for converting labour into money. Let us look more deeply at the various parts of the Dritter Weg document that discuss economic problems (the entire text of the “red book" is given in the Fifth Station). 286

1. Separation of work and income—a basic principle of future socialism (the income-framework of the third road Interest Collective). Contemporary social reality is characterized by a world-wide labour system that is a direct result of the division of labour. Apart from in the few remaining domestic and exchange economies, the world economy is characterized by the fact that the working individual, as a rule, no longer works to satisfy his own needs, but rather he produces to satisfy the needs of his brothers. He himself derives what he requires for the fulfilment of his needs from the efforts of others. This integral system similarly embraces all sub-systems of the society: industry, commerce, transport, just as much as the entire sphere of schooling and education, the universities, agriculture, banks and so on. In this system in which each is fulfilling the needs of others, it is absurd to persist in basing the income of human-beings on the principle of the so-called labour-equivalent, because as a quantitative economic category, wages for labour has become a complete unreality. In a world labour-system as unbelievably complex and differentiated as today's, how on earth can each individual's share of the collective accomplishment (gesamtleistung) truly be determined! And exactly the same is the case for the individual business. Naturally, whether an undertaking shows good or bad results in terms of its production is entirely dependent on the efforts of the work-collective (a group of workers whose abilities all flow together in it). However, the financial expression of these results (which appear today as so-called market results), is in fact dependent on many other factors as well. The view that the financial result mirrors the business practice, and can be taken as a real measure of the total product, is a pure ideology. To this can be added the anthropological fact, that the different abilities of humans cannot simply all be lumped together with what is called “productivity It is a negation of human dignity to calculate the income scale according to difference in abilities. All evaluations of labour that have to do with the question of income, if measured on an abilities pyramid, are estranged from reality and inhuman.

Work - Human

and Free

The real nature of work is not economically measurable, but is rather of central human value; for it is through work that each active individual employs his abilities for the well being of the whole of mankind—though in the present social-systems these abilities are unfortunately harnessed to his own detriment. Work in modern society always means “work for others," in other words, work no longer serves to care only for oneself, but is, 287

on the contrary, totally directed towards satisfying the needs of one's brothers.

Conversely,

one's own

needs are, to a large ex-

tent, satisfied through the work of others. Though still very much hidden at the core of modern labour conditions, one could say that they have long taken on the character of brotherly co-operation. But this brotherhood impulse is still unable to be socially effective because it is crushed by the alienating principle of private and national egoism. If one draws real conclusions from the underlying brotherhood character of the modern world of work, then it follows that the income of a worker cannot be a so-called remuneration (a compensation) for the work he has performed, but that this income is rather the elementary prerequisite in terms of rights, which enables a human being to work self-responsibly and of his own inner freedom—vwhich means too, with insight into the life needs and conditions of the whole social organism. Therefore work and income are in fact, on account of the essential nature of contemporary social development, two completely independent facts. It follows then, that for the future third road society a person will only perform such work as he can recognise and feel is meaningful to the whole. Possibly/—yes, most probably, a great deal of that for which people are compelled to work today, in order to draw a salary and be able to live, will vanish, because the meaninglessness of such practices will be recognized and therefore no longer continued. The incentive to work only becomes humane and free when it arises from the awareness that we should employ our abilities for that which has positive human value—in other words, the value of such work and abilities being measured in relation to man—and not regarded as abstract economic values. And in order that the individual be able to work from such an incentive— the only humanly-dignified incentive—he requires an income as a prerequisite for any such work. The amount will be worked out, on the one hand, according to one's needs, and on the other, it will depend on and be determined by what the realities of life are for the whole human community.

Income as Fundamental Category of the Rights-Structure The income of a person will be arrived at both through democratic agreement within a whole social unit with regard to the basic income-framework, as well as from agreement by the individual work-collectives, functioning within the boundaries of this basic income-framework, as to individual income. The objections to this perspective are well known. It is said that in so describing the whole situation one completely misses both 288

the consciousness and the interests of working people. It is pointed out the real interests of the workers are most probably entirely directed towards getting as high wages as possible, a share in the profits and to accumulating wealth (property). But one must ask oneself what the real interests of man are— each can prove it for himself: Are the elementary interests not quite clearly directed toward social security and the satisfaction of life's needs in spirituallmental/psychic/emotional/ and material respects? These basic interests and inclinations can become completely clear within a just income-structure. People will only cling fast to the principles of wages, profit and property—blind to their ever increasing catastrophic consequences—as long as there is no such just income-structure. And isn't freedom—this being allowed to use the capacity to contribute something meaningful to fulfil the real needs of other people, the other elementary, basic inclination, one that is not just superficial show but truly satisfies our inner nature? Unbiased self-examination would in most people come to precisely this observation... 2. From the (Money) Exchange-Economy to the Abilities-Economy The overcoming of private-ownership, the profit-principle and wages-for-labour (The monetary structure of the Interest Collective)

What is the core of this significant process? In order to be able to answer this question we must take a brief look at the course of economic history. As far as the historical continuum is able to show—the development of the economic-life of mankind has passed through four stages: The initial stage of self-sufficiencyv—the subsistence economy—was superseded by the barter system or goods-exchange economy, and this further developed into a money ex change-economy. With the rise of industrialization the new type of abilities-economy came into being: this is what we have today, to an extreme. What distinguishes the abilities-economy from all earlier economic forms? Existing already even in the subsistence economy we find needs, nature, work, goods and a certain amount of tools; but prices, expenses, charges and wages still did not exist. In the primitive barter/goods-exchange economy the situation was still not very different—although they certainly had gradually to form ideas as to the exchange value of goods. Thereby the first forms of planned thinking and division of labour arose. And with this occurred certain developments which finally led to money becoming the means of exchange; to capital becoming both the means of rationalization and of payment, in place of payment with goods. 289

Money as a means of Exchange - and a means of Deception Thus in the advanced goods-exchange economy people had money as the means of exchange. To begin with one paid the individual for the goods that he had produced. Later it shifted to people being paid for the work performed, which by so doing made them contributors to a collective, complex form of production. This process of development is today so far advanced, that in the industrialized sector of the world it is almost impossible to determine unequivocally and with justifiable certainty who contributes what to the production of a product. The total product can no longer be divided up according to the work performed. In modern society it has far more to do with an “integral system"”—this is what we have called it—in which all work performed is interconnected with and built on other work.

But behind the actual transformations in the economic sphere of the social organism lies a crucial aspect of the outmoded thinking—the conception of money. This conception of Money today still underlies all the monetary systems. Money is, as before, seen as a means of exchange, just as a commodity in a goods-exchange-economy. Although no real basis exists for such an outlook, all economic thinking and action centres around an “as-if" philosophy, a philosophy estranged from and therefore anti-pathetic to reality. Man believing money to be the genial means of exchange, thinks that conditions can be harmonized with the help of money. And it is really very curious that this veiling of reality persists, since, as has already been clear for decades, this money-structure is in no way a harmonizing factor. It leads, on the contrary, to the growth of an ever more incurable chaos. Money seems to exercise a kind of blinding effect on people, to the extent that they are no longer in the position to see the realities. They turn money into an anonymous system of domination over themselves. With money conceived of as a universal means of ex change everything is easily turned into a commodity, creating the total commodity-society, in which everyone tries to get as large a part for himself as possible. If one has money, one can exchange it for anything: goods, work, capital, land... If one has money, it can multiply itsel'—through interest and compound interest. When money is converted into capital, the right is created to forever collect profit. Money invested in property and land guarantees high winnings from such speculation. VVhen money is connected to organised labour, then there is a possibility that through rising wages, one's share of the total product will be increased.

This whole situation is, however, no longer grounded in the reality of the present at all. In the process of development from the exchange-economy to the abilities-economy, new conditions have been created in the production-sphere of the economy. These con290

Difesa della Natura sign, Bolognano, May 13, 1984

ditions need to be understood with concepts that are new and completely different from the concepts relating to the conditions of the exchange-economy. 1. Objectively seen—there is no longer any concrete basis of measurement according to which the work-performance of an individual can be exchanged for money, and thus receive its rightful share of the whole. 2. Objectively seen—the prices of the commodities are no longer simply the market prices created by supply and demand; a large percentage of the price of goods today is due to factors external to the market being calculated into the price. 3. Objectively seen—the total capital of the sphere of production is not in any way the result of the labour of those who today possess it as their property; it grew from the flowing together of the scientific and the technical developments of many generations and is a means at the disposal of the work-collectives to produce all the necessary goods and services. 4. And finally it is valid to say that: work today can, by and large, only be carried out in large social groups—collectives—and that a single undertaking is conceivable only as a part of the whole, and furthermore, that the whole has increasingly taken on the character of a world-economy. lt follows logically from these phenomena that undertakings can no longer be considered as private enterprises and private property. Just as little can they be seen as state enterprises and state property. With an unchanged concept of money such continual and unnatural distortions of reality will remain with all their negative consequences. In order that these consequences, that we have come to know as manifestations of the present social system, be organically overcome, a concept of money must be developed that truly fits the abilities-economy and all social actions must be oriented accordingly.

The Function of Money as Bearer of Rights and Duties The decisive aspect of the new conception of money is that moneyprocesses are no longer seen as an economic matter but rather as having to do with the processes of the rights-sphere. In fact they actually determine the social rights-life and serve as the basis against which all other rights-processes are orientated.The moment that one recognises that money is a pure “rights-element” then the rights-sphere to which money actually belongs, separates itself from the economic sphere. This concept of money then no longer allows rights-processes to be dealt with as economic-processes, as Is happening all over today, destroying the life of society. Irre292

spective of the form that money appears in, whether it be cheques, notes or coins, it is not a commodity, but a rights-document exclusively. The rights-value that money takes on in the abilities-economy results from the basic structure of such an economy. This type of economy is characterized by two polar processes, which when looked at in isolation appear to be incomprehensible, but which, in essence, nevertheless form a whole. There is, on the one hand, the highly differentiated stream of abilityvalues, the output of all active persons, and the network of universal cooperation within a system of complex labour division. Self-centred work disappears in the stream of collective-work, which has become the primary reality. The real reason for the flowing together of abilities in the production-places, has to do with the material and spiritual needs of the consumers. Ultimately, as “employers/ consumers “oblige” undertakings to produce goods. Just as one pole is the stream of ability-values flowing from the households to the production places, so the other is the stream of consumption values flowing from the production-places, as the goods that have come into being through work on nature. The stream of goods flows to the consumers, to meet their various needs (since the principles of what is being considered here are most important, one need not be concerned here with that part of the goods-stream that extends the nature-base—forming the means of production— and which thus stays back in the sphere of production). So, the economic sphere of the social organism, in its present stage of development, appearing to be an incomprehensible state of affairs when looked at in its details, essentially also seems to be a whole: the constant generation (production) and expending (consumption) of values, and directing the flow of the ability-values to the production-places and the nature-values (goods) to the consumers, constitutes the life of this organism in the realm of its economy. It is work that sets the processes of the economic-sphere in motion: “ability-values” act upon nature and to the extent that they are lost nature-values (goods) are brought forth. Thus the economic sphere has to do with the employment and making use of “ability values/ the building-up and breaking down of “nature-values,’ and also seeing that all these “values” are properly directed. The money-circulation system is in fact a rights-process, and as such is bound up with the regulation of these two polar economic processes. The basic-structure of this rights-process, whose mediator is Money, is also made up of two poles: on the one hand obliging (as duties) and on the other as entitling (as rights). The money-circulation system has as its point of departure in the modern economic process, the credit-bank system, which gives money to undertakings in the form of credit. This money is originally created, so to speak, “out of nothing," by the basic institution of the rights-life, the central-bank. The impetus for such a “credit-system” comes ultimately from the needs of the consumers, in other words from 293

“demand This “demand impulse” appears first in the retail-trade and then spreads in illimitable ways through the entire domain of undertakings, including those undertakings that acquire raw-materials and natural-forces directly from the earth. On behalf of the consumers, from whom all these impulses proceed, the credit-banks (which are co-ordinated by the central-bank) articulate the obligation that each undertaking has to produce goods corresponding to the requested money that they have been given, whether this be in banknotes or in writing (i.e. in a suitable exchange-form). Thereby the co-workers of an undertaking are “obliged” to utilize their abilities in the production of goods. AIIl money in the hands of an undertaking actually means the right (essentially: the self-assumed duty) of all the co-workers to use their abilities in the production-practices of the undertaking. Money loses this first rights-meaning when it assumes a new one in the hands of the “income receiver": the right to acquire goods. In the hands of the co-workers who receive the income, money in its function as a rights-document is now a bill of exchange for the consumer goods that the “income receiver” wants to buy. This back-flowing stream of money naturally has no connection with economic values. As a valueless rights-document it must now go back to the banks—(who in giving out the money, committed the undertaking to production)—to cover credits. One can see what phenomenal consequences are brought about when money is thought about in terms of rights: the money that the undertakings take in through the sale of their products is valueless; at this point it grants no rights; but for the sake of order it has to be removed from circulation, so that it doesn't just float about.To enter anew into circulation it requires the issue of a new rights-document. Such a document will be issued by an authorized organ of the central-bank and creditbank-system. (See the Third Paragraph in the Fifth Station) There are two main points to be examined in Beuys's discussion of the various aspects of “the new economy” (a discussion in which | would argue the artist's commitment is clear). First of all, it should be observed that Beuys does not view the economy of the modern-day world as some sort of overgrown monster, whose baneful influence has increased over the centuries. On the contrary, we have already seen how the most striking aspect of the contemporary economy— that is, the cultivation of man's productive capacities not solely for the individual himself but also for the benefit of one and all—is, as far as Beuys is concerned, a fundamental achievement; it marks a real step towards universal fraternal collaboration. But for full collaboration to come about one has to overcome the old concepts that have nothing to do with the new conditions of the world economy. Hence, the criticisms of the concepts of “property/ of “salary” or “profit”— which in an economy based on capacities and abilities would have no reason to exist. 294

But first and foremost, what follows from the above is the need to change the role of Money as a medium of exchange, unvaried since the emergence of the old exchange economy. Beuys sees money not as constituting economic value but rather as documenting rights and duties. On the one hand, it enables man to perform his function as a consumer—that is, to satisfy all his needs;

on the other, it obliges him to perform his task as a producer—that is, to work for the good of his fellow man. Hence one can see that Beuys introduces a new concept of money, transforming it into a legal document whose sole purpose should be to regulate the flux between production and consumption. Money should be the document that enables man to perform his function as a consumer and obliges him to perform his duty as a producer. So, Beuys argues, money should be distributed from a Central Bank to manufacturing companies, to then be withdrawn when it has been invested in goods. Humankind has to be freed from the dictatorship of economic power. This can be achieved by cultivating man's productive capacities within an Economy of Capacities which replaces the old exchange economy. Capital would no longer exist as money, because the only real capital would be the capacity to produce, individual creativity. Here one might conclude: this enticing new economy arises out of man's creative capacities and abilities, with work being a part of the life of each individual and dedicated to the collective within a context of collaboration and communication. Now we come to the second interesting feature. It is truly extraordinary the frequency with which organic images reappear in Beuys's Theory of Money. Terms such as “flux” “organs,’ “central bank," “circulation” give the entire theory the air of a naturalistic description. The functioning of the economy becomes comparable to the circulation of the blood within an individual. Just as blood flows through veins and arteries in a fluid and, above all, uniform manner, so money flows within the channels of production, distribution and consumption; if it were to accumulate excessively in one place, its effect would become non-organic, threatening the survival of the other vital organs of the economy. Here one should quote Beuys's own definition of “capital” as such: Kunst = Kapitat-the third slogan. One might develop the thinking behind this third slogan in the following manner. As time progresses, there will be a radical change in the very notion of capital, which will be understood in a more anthropological sense... People will understand that humanity's one true capital is its ability to produce, is the creativity of free individuals. A truly anthropological concept of capital reveals that capital and the human spirit are one and the same thing. The primary value is creativity—that is, the spirit and abilities of the individuals that make up humanity. Thus one will see the waning of the laws which currently govern our life: profit, the abuse of power 295

and the negation of human dignity which smothers our vital ener gies will all come to an end. In the new culture that arises there will be no recognition of differences between upper and lower senses, between body and spirit, between the art of living and the art of loving, between a culture of sensibility and a culture of sensuality. In effect, in all the various fields in which he was engaged, Beuys's work was constantly predicated upon a concept of the universal which seemed to pose the following question: Why, in giving ex pression to his creativity in all the various fields in which he is engaged, should man draw upon principles that are totally extraneous to him, instead of acting as an organism of spiritual, physical and mental capacities, an organism capable of responding to the reality of Nature? The magic of Beuys as a man and artist was that he was able to push aside all the pointless clutter that had accumulated within the various levels at which man exercises his capacity for expression (clutter which poses a serious threat to the reconstruction of a genuine and truthful image of the individual). Anyone who looks at Beuys's work carefully cannot help but note that throughout his career he was continually exploring new means of expression: drawings, objects, aktionen, film, video, images, texts, public discussions, lectures, etc. And the result is a single oeuvre of numerous levels and layers, which is there for all to see. What is surprising is that he makes his Voice (invisible material) the key factor in his pedagogical method. The place where Beuys found it most natural to make his voice— his words—heard was the Academy of Fine Arts. As already mentioned, he was appointed Professor of Monumental Sculpture in 1961, and would continue teaching until 1972. Each choice and decision with regard to such work within society—plus the numerous statements with regard to himself—was an integral part of his anthropological work, his famous Living Sculpture. By working within a place of cultural education—a place subject to all the decline resulting from the State's policy with regard to fur ther education—Beuys was striving to redefine the very concept of “culture. And he did this by taking an a-typical approach, by holding lessons that were the very opposite of the model promoted by the institutions of Power. As Beuys said: Sculpture—and therefore art as a whole—must always be obstinate in questioning the premises which underlie culture as it currently prevails.

This is how Klaus Staeck describes Beuys as a teacher: “For an entire generation of young artists, Joseph Beuys was a very strict, but very patient, teacher. Just as he managed to make the simple things of everyday life into part of his own art, he placed far greater stress upon man than upon machine; in short, he trusted more in the imagination and in the possibilities that slumber within each of us than in machines and workshops furnished with 296

ERESRER IRE RES

LL

22,06

Outside the Fridericiamum Museum, Beuys and young people from FI.U.,

Documenta VI, Kassel 1977

the most refined equipment. But this does not mean at all that he was opposed to the use of technology; far from it, as he himself demonstrated in numerous of his constructions. When, during our first visit to the USA in 1974, we were in Minneapolis, we visited a whole load of ateliers that were full of the most modern technological equipment, but then we found ourselves standing in front of easels on which there was a rather bleak display of the students’ work. Beuys blurted out: ‘Once again, even with ever possible advantage, nothing has been achieved. | would start off by giving them a potato-peeler and a piece to wood, to see the results." It is clear that Beuys took his job as a teacher seriously. He felt a responsibility for his students, to whom he undoubtedly wished to communicate something. At the same time, he saw the action of teaching—and the organization of that action within the educational system—as crucially important because an expression of the life of the spirit. The following is another reminiscence, this time by Johannes Stuttgen, Beuys's pupil and friend: “When Beuys was invited to become Professor of Monumental Sculpture at the DUsseldorf Kunstakademie it exactly fitted the state of his work on the widening of the concept of art, since this meant that it penetrated 297

the institutions, and first of all the institution for which he was most competent: the Art Academy. What Beuys found was a redundant and atrophied scene, staterun and bereft of ideas. Beuys proceeded systematically. He had brought the substance of the widened concept of art to his workplace and now it was taking effect. The Fluxus concept suited him perfectly. After two years' teaching, when Beuys organized the huge international Fluxus events in the academy, he was determined that it would not stop at concerts, actions and paintings. He wanted at all costs to get out of the state-sheltered ghetto of the ‘free space' allocated to art, away from the old conception of art, out of the old academic conception. For if the new widened concept of academy was applied to everything, to every human production, then this insight could not be without consequences for traditional institutions, given of course that one behaved accordingly. That was Beuys. He determined above all to erase privilege from within. Having declared that every human being is principally an artist, and that only a concept of art that embraced this totality could be of contemporary value, he had naturally to insist on the unlimited acceptance of all who wished to be admitted as students. What right had the state to interfere? This elementary relationship was obvious if you thought about it, and Beuys was the one who thought at the academy. Teachers who had accepted state civil service status had no use for thought, and they didn't understand it. Or want it. While Beuys was convinced that space facilities should be organized according to the needs of people and made available in response to them, the bureaucrats said: ‘No, the other way round! Limited space, so limited students!’ (In reality they should have sought space but they were not bothered.)To which Beuys replied: If necessary, | can teach in a barrel. From this description it becomes clear how inappropriate the separation of ‘artistic’ from ‘pedagogic’ or ‘political’ would be, since each developed logically out of the others. It follows that ‘the widening of the concept of art' means the extension of the freedom impulse to all other concepts and the fields they determine, meaning that government and shaping of all earthly relationships are in the hands of people: total rejection of centralism. Human creativitr—developed from the concept of art which represents the human being as having always been a creator and shaper—the only capital of the future. And that was the experience of Monumental Sculpture: the redundant art academy had been blown up from within, and its indigestible remains had then to be completely ejected. In 1972 that looked to the uninitiated like a reason for dismissing Joseph Beuys. The remains of the academy can still be visited” Here we have a reference to the numerous problems that Beuys encountered during his time in the Academy—problems which he himself certainly never tried to avoid. The fact is that he never took teaching as being a bureaucratic career; as Professor of Monumental Sculpture, he did not see himself as a State employee but as 298

someone who occupied a position that could generate energy both for himself and for others. Beuys was very active, involving everyone in what he did. He produced new ideas; planned special events; was father, brother and confidante to students whom he loved and who loved him in return. Clearly, such behaviour was unpopular with most of the other members of the teaching body; and one of those who found the unorthodox Beuys hardest to take was the Academy's Director, E. Trier. And here one should point out that neither the Director of the Academy nor the Ministry itself behaved correctly towards the teacher Joseph Beuys. Vvhilst it was usual for all professors to be given tenure after five years of teaching, this did not happen with Beuys—because the Ministry of Education in North Westphalia did not want to confirm his position as a state functionary. Beuys always had a yearly contract, which was not renewed after 1968— so from 1968 to 1972 he actually worked at the Academy with no contract and no salary. All of this makes it clear that the authorities made no secret of their intention to get rid of Beuys at the first opportunity. These are statements made by the Director of the Dusseldorf Academy, E. Trier, and by one of its most eminent teachers, Norbert Kricke: Trier: “.. | tolerate this consciousness message as far as it understands and offers art. But | oppose it when it forces the institute to which | am answerable to become a political salvation for men and thereby threaten the artistic freedom of others. Kricke: “Beuys loves the Academy, he loves it in his own way; still | become pensive when an artist of today cannot live without adhering a sheltering institution, when he uses the Academy as a refuge and home and clasps it to him... Fear appears to be his impetus, it is rooted deep and is everywhere in him: technology is bad, today is bad, cars are terrible, computers are inhuman, television is inhuman, rockets are horrible, the splitting of atoms destroys the world. Escape into yesterday, betterment of men, longing for the past: old equipment, bundles tied with cord, dust and felt, fatty substances, wax and wood, pliable textures, dried things and melted things; he serves everything grey, brown and black, like darkened old paintings, museum dust, museum smell on all objects already at their origination, his world is dusky and seldom aired; continual play, hiding place in hiding place, wax on the box, fat in the corner, remaining agonizingly long in the rolled up carpet: He takes it upon himself for all of us. That is his demand; a representative of suffering, he plays the Messiah, he wants to convert us, he wants to let the Academy take over the role of the Church— that is for me his Jesus-kitsch." It would be pointless to try to answer these observations. What is interesting is that they reveal a clear difference in “points of view. Even allowing for the usual antipathy that may exist between teachers—and the opposition which a traditionalist may have felt to Beuys's more human approach to his students—the words used 299

À BINIERI

by Krick seem to reveal a real aversion to, | would even say hatred and envy of, the man and artist Joseph Beuys. | think it is worth reflecting upon such coarseness of expression. Beuys, for his part, continued in his mission of bringing life and vitality to the Academy, trying to get rid of all the dross that was— and is—to be found in most institutions of specialist education and which severely impedes the healthy and organic development of the students' creative potential. (This issue raises the important matter of an interdisciplinary approach—vwhich, as we have seen, inspired the FI.U.) Beuys wanted to know why a teacher should not talk about politics, if his students were interested in the subject and wanted him to do so? Why should he not respond to their interest in social issues? He was convinced that the Sculpture as he taught it to his students could meet these needs—but, one must emphasize, only if the commitment on the part of the students matched that shown by the teacher himself; Beuys never had any time for those who were indifferent, idle or merely “tagged along. Beuys: This means that the teacherpupil relationship must be changed from the notion that the one who is informed is the teacher and the pupil is merely a listener. It should not be assumed as a matter of course that the pupil is less capable than the teacher. For this reason the teaching-learning relationship must be totally open and constantly reversible, which means, in fact, the suppression of learning and teaching as institutionalized ways of behaviour. In an interdisciplinary school the teaching-learning system must be oscillating, for the young people of today have a more intense relationship, especially to sociopolitical questions, than most teachers do. Young people are born with the need to ask political questions and all too often teachers resist this. This is especially true of those who persist in their institutionalized privileges and want to make all decisions ex cathedra. The tense relations between Beuys and Academy became open and irreparable rupture in 1971, following a dispute regarding restrictions upon student admissions. Beuys considered the law regarding the criteria of selection to be unfair. Furthermore, he envisaged schools not as places for those who had been well educated but for those who had most difficulty in studying. This was why he declared that he would accept into his class the 142 students whose application had been turned down. In doing so, he openly defied a letter which the Education Minister Rau had written to the Academy Director Trier on the matter.

Beuys: That did not mean that any student could cozily establish himself with me, as is so often falsely maintained; the students were scrupulously examined by me as to whether study at the Academy of Art could have a certain value for their life. For me 302

previous pages Joseph Beuys, Bolognano 1978

the current system of determining admission with the help of a portfolio of the students drawings is no longer valid; my experience with this principle of choosing has been very negative. My most interesting students have been in fact not those who sought to present a glittering portfolio but rather among those who had been rejected. If | did not have this conception of the progression of the principles of school, education, university, culture, creativity, freedom— I could not justify my position. Because | have these conceptions | want to accept students without any restrictions. And since | am answerable for them, | will strive for a fair method of teaching and appropriate instruction in the current unsatisfactory situation. But what | want to aim at in the end is the transformation of our sociopolitical system. In the conception of this goal there is also a clear criticism of the party now in power, a criticism of formal democracy. For this reason the conception of a new school also includes the goal of conquering purely formal, representative democracy, which does not carry out the statute that “all power comes from the people.” | want to make such contradictions in our political statutes known so that the majority of the population can one day negotiate and make use of their fundamental rights. I have no illusions and do not believe that this evolutionary-revolutionary goal can be accomplished in a single step—l! always say evolutionary-revolutionary: evolutionary in method and revolutionary in alm, in the end effect. But it is clear to me that critical awareness is growing and is heading in the evolutionary-revolutionary direction—that is something which | experience every day. Thus, on October 15, 1971, Beuys occupied the offices of the Academy, calling for a meeting with Rau himself in order to resolve the admissions question; in effect, sixteen of the rejected students took up Beuys's invitation and attended his classes. On October 21, the Ministry sent written confirmation that those sixteen could be enrolled for the winter semester. But by then Beuys had realized that a new sort of structure was needed, one that would provide a genuine (cultural and human) education for the students by facilitating their engagement with the real world, by helping them to grow and mature. And thus the project for a Free University came about, being implemented the following year with the foundation of the FI.U. Beuys was clear that the political battle to be fought was for the principle of a Free University. Beuys: The greater part of the membership of colleges (students) is limited today because material security for studying is not even minimally provided. Students

must,

on

account

of this ineffective

situation,

seek,

through part-time work or occasional jobs during the semester or vacation time—which should serve for study or relaxation—the financial means for their education, and they must be freed from 303

this situation. (Not to mention the seeking of stipends or the unjust distribution of financial aid.) It would only be the realization of the fundamental right of education if students actually had at their disposal the financial means for the material security of their studies. Whoever studies also works for society, just as those who later put into practice the capabilities of their profession do. The non-payment of the work called “studying” stems from the consciousness that no aim wants to lead to the realization of the basic right of equal opportunity for the intellectual development ofall. The privileges of a certain segment of society were thus regularly bequeathed. A _majority must be informed and decide by direct vote which contributions from the free capital (people's income) should be made available for the financing of education. In this way laws could ensure the material means for studying and living during the educational period. The idea of educational money for students must correlate with the principle of a “Free College," that is, financing the college money fin connection with the students’ desire for education: 1. Food, clothes, housing 2. Teacher honoraria

3. Maintenance and improvement of higher education institutions. The total membership of teachers and students will determine the amount of money for point 3. Point 2 and special artistic or scientific projects will be financed with the rest of the educational contributions. The Free College will achieve equality of rights for a free completion of study with state exams (which provide free, not civil servant, teachers for the course of study). Students are at liberty within the framework of a free college to complete their studies with a state exam. The uncapable can, under certain circumstances, regulate the grading process, while on the other hand a students actual capabilities in such a case are not really presented. If equal opportunity exists in this sense, almost no one will be able to be convinced any longer of the necessity of state exams—/.e., for the purposes of performance control. It will be acknowledged that the opposite is the case. Inferior students can influence their grades in certain cases while, on the other side of the coin, the capabilities of many students are not able to manifest themselves. Moreover, a performance control for the teacher is not contained therein. Verification of entire school systems in the light of the public is hindered. No one is given the responsibility for the unsatisfactory performance of students who rake a state exam. 304

On the other hand, uncontrolled teachers are personally responsible for the statements of capability which they give their students.

One can clearly see analogies here between this project and that concerned with the creation of a healthier form of economy. That same year Beuys would produce a “Musical Score” which listed the Rights of Academic Freedom, arguing that 1.A Free Academy was not to be controlled by the government. 2. Society was to exercise control via the (free) means of information and in direct democratic decisions. 3. The mass media were to be regularly made available to scientists and teachers of all opinions, so that they could inform people of their ideas. This would make it possible to protect society against the criminal designs of certain scientists and their followers. 4. The public were not informed of the antisocial behaviour of certain industrial groups and the scientists linked with them, because power groups prevent a clear public exposition of the issues involved. As already mentioned, Beuys transferred his Information Office for the Organization for Direct Democracy to the Kassel Documenta in summer

1972. When

he returned

to DUsseldorf,

he again

clashed with the minister Rau over the admission of students who had been rejected by the other teachers. Together with fifty-four students, he would occupy the Academy's administrative offices on October 10, but without any damage to property or persons. The minister responded by sacking Prof. Beuys outright, though the occupation of the Administrative Offices continued to October 13. During these three days, hundreds of students held protest marches in his support, with the police being called in to restore order. Amongst the many who supported Beuys and his occupation were Allan Kaprow, Heiner Bastian, Renè Block, Johannes Stuttgen and Klaus Streack, as well as the great German writer Heinrich Béll, co-author of the manifesto that listed the new principles of the interdisciplinary school (and a writer whose work offers an ironic portrait of the bourgeois elite in both Catholic and Nazi Germany). Beuys would consult his lawyers, initiating a lawsuit that, after a series of alternating verdicts and various hearings, would not end

until April 7, 1978, when the Kassel Supreme Court ruled that the Ministry of Education in Rhineland-North Westphalia had acted illegally when it dismissed Prof. Joseph Beuys from his position as Professor at the Dusseldorf Academy of Fine Arts. Beuys, however, waived his right to almost six years of back pay and compensation, but he did obtain the installation within the Dusseldorf Academy of Fine Arts of his own Free International University. It was

this, his own

creation

as an educational

establishment, 305

which gave Beuys the greatest satisfaction, allowing him to explore his notion of “creativity” and the freedom which was inseparable from it. Joseph Beuys offers us an image that strives towards the horizon of myth, towards a full expression of the human, in the world of capital, where everything is standardised by the laws of utility and consumption. That image undergoes a constant process of rupture and recomposition, with vitalcomponents combining and separating to generate new ideas, new forms and new stages in the formation of material. Balancing between rational spirit and the “delirium” of alchemical intuition, the secret book, the humus vitale, reveals itself to us. It stands against the dominion of the Logos and stirs the visionary capacity of free men, drawing upon the full extent of our powers for love, suffering and sublimation. In this process of catharsis, everything is put at stake—for this is essential if we are to move beyond a life of theatre and appearance to one of natural organic vitality. For Beuys, this transmutation is only possible at an individual level via the demiurgic creation of a world whose physiognomy is that each free man would wish it to be. Such a shift becomes a process of purification and rebirth, of liberation from the prison of absolute rationality, and the construction of a new universe which can embrace one's own impulses of both life and destruction. It is here that truly authentic freedom will be celebrated as a sacrament upon the altar of love. Within the confines of our consumerist, confused and necrophiliac society, Joseph Beuys drew upon the symbolism of alchemy and the esoteric to trace out a Third Way, a Dritter Weg, so that all our faculties might celebrate the One and the All. Beuys argued for the need of a new mode of feeling, perceiving and knowing. There is an urgent need for an inner reawakening, with imagination and intuition serving as the instruments of knowledge and creativity. Beuys restored our awareness of our own psychic power, freeing us from our paralysis of being. In each human he recognized a regal divinity. Finally, he preached the need for a Regal Art, wherein hidden energies may dance to the sound of the clavicembalo (harpsichord) the ancient dance of Man's rebirth.

Joseph Beuys, Diary of Seychelles, December 1980

307

The idea ofliberty tells us that each one ofus is different, and the idea

ofdemocracy should simply mean that all ofus are equal before the law

(Joseph Beuys)

Fourth Station

Beuys.

Complexities and historical references

Annotation

Before we start some clarification is due. The paragraphs that make up this Fourth Station (Beuys and Steiner, Beuys and Romanticism, Beuys and Schelling) have not been conceived of according to the principle of the pair at all costs. An attitude of the kind would do no more than banalize the contents of each of the terms in question. Nonetheless, a comparison is warranted, actually, it is quite useful, if we consider the fact that Beuys himself never felt that it was dishonourable to show a sincere appreciation for certain cultural figures from the past. On the contrary, he always supported the idea that it was precisely from a comparison with their ideas that new viewpoints of concrete use to modern man could be elaborated. Such a comparison can thus contribute first of all to learning more about and delving more deeply into Beuys's thinking—which is the purpose of this publication; secondly, it can provide us with a different vision of that fundamental period in the history of culture known as Romanticism, which the two eminent philosophers Rudolf Steiner and Friedrich Wilhelm Schelling are indeed closely bound to. As a matter of fact, an attempt will be made to demonstrate how both of these men refer back to a basic conceptual nucleus that in practical terms is resolved by way of a specific attitude before “reality/' i.e. in a special understanding of it. Beuys would very often ask: Which reality are we actually talking about? And ... for Novalis reality means “making what is ordinary and mundane extraordinary and mysterious, and conversely, what is unknown and mysterious ordinary. What stems from all this is the truly essential nature of Beuys's thought, akin to that of the “Romantic” man: the way to hidden truth does not lie in the invention of a system that can contain it; it already exists in the world and man need do no more than search for it in himself and in Nature.

Diary of Seychelles operation, Beuys at the Valle de Mai, Praslin, December 1980 371

Man and Nature, their souls joined together, will make up a true world (Joseph Beuys)

Joseph

Beuys

on

es oper December

1980

La

A

Ù

n

i sd

SAS

These important thinkers already pointed to a direction, but they were overwhelmed by materialistic tendencies. Now we can have a new point of view on such ideas instead (Joseph Beuys)

Beuys and Romanticism If, strictly speaking, we wish to discuss a “School of Romanticism” we need to refer to the Jena Group, which gathered the most prominent figures of the new German culture, people who were against Enlightenment ideals. The movement was quite short-lived, as it only lasted from 1798 to 1803. Friedrich Schlegel and his brother August Wilhelm, with his wife Caroline, stayed in Jena, as did the poet Ludwig Tieck. Schelling taught at the University of Jena; Schiller, as a historian, also taught there, followed in time by Novalis. Located very close to Jena is Weimar, the city where Goethe lived. And even if Goethe considered the Romantic movement with ironic detachment, and Schiller opposed the movement openly, the Romanticists still considered these men to be Masters, an indication of a substantial homogeneousness on an ideal level. Although we can recognize the differences that characterized these figures, confirmed by the fact that they dedicated their lives to a variety of interests, such as poetry, literature, essay-writing and philosophy, there was one feature common to all of them, and this was a particular way of relating to reality, from which a particular way of understanding it was derived. We have already seen how this aspect is not just relevant but downright essential in Beuys (/ always begin with one question: which realty are we actually dealing with); now we see how close the position of a Romantic, namely Novalis, is: “To romanticize is making what is ordinary and mundane extraordinary and mysterious, and conversely, what is unknown and mysterious ordinary. The Romantic attitude can thus be viewed as a creative attitude that seeks to grasp the ideal aspect that is present in reality. We can thus sum up by saying that an inquiry uniquely connoted by mechanism is evidently incapable of achieving. This aspect is quite clear in Goethe, whose thinking possesses as an essential foundation the original impression of an immediate unity between man and nature, thus of the ideal and the real. The original phenomenon that Goethe seeks in nature is not structure in its static form, but formation in its vital dynamism. The development of organic forms is not produced by mathematical concepts and the mechanisms of illuministic science; rather, it is produced by concepts of transformation through the polarity of opposing forces that operate within them, and the ensuing growth. Clearly, in such a conception we can already trace, even if embryonically, a proposal for a new idea of science; moreover, the typical idea of Romanticism is gleaned from a parallel between art and science. Beuys agreed with what Goethe had determined in regard to the fact that Art and Science seemed to have taken refuge the one with the other, and he confirmed that these two disciplines seemed to have been reconciled before man had become aware of this. This means 315

that Goethe, like Beuys, sought a broadened concept of science. Beuys also believed that Art and Science together belonged to some broader kinship. Once again Novalis helps us out by clarifying the concepts of art and science: “Scientists and poets have, by speaking one language, always shown themselves to be one people. What the scientists have gathered and arranged in huge, well-ordered stores, has been made by the poets into the daily food and consolation of human hearts; the poets have broken up the one, immeasurable nature, and moulded it into various small, amenable natures. Poets have lightheartedly pur sued the liquid and fugitive in a weak sense, while scientists have cut into the inner structure and sought after the way it is made and its natural conditions. Under their hands friendly nature dies, leaving behind only dead, quivering remnants, while for the poet, as if drunken, she becomes a divine myth, lifted out of her everyday life, dancing towards the sky, embracing all her guests and sharing her treasures. Thus she enjoys heavenly hours with the poet and calls the scientist only when she is sick and sorrowful. And yet on these occasions she answers each one of his questions and treats the stern man with reverence. Those who would know her spirit truly must therefore seek it in the company of poets, where she is free and pours forth her wondrous heart. But those who do not love her from the bottom of their hearts, who only admire this and that in her and wish to learn this and that about her, would do best to be examined by a physician‘ Notwithstanding the sentimental and poetic value conveyed to us by Novalis's words, as well as by the countless other writings by the Romantics, what shines through is a value which it is objectively justified, if not indeed dutiful, to pause and think about. Novalis insists on the need for a “conversion to art)" in the sense that only the poet's soul is capable of upholding a harmonious and balanced relationship in relation to nature, and thus reality. To be precise, this does not mean that the artist and nature are in perfect equilibrium, because this would lead to stasis and thus to an arrest in the vital processes; what this means is that the artist must recognize the presence of a spirit in nature as well, of a soul in real objects too, of mystery even in what might seem to be run-of-the-mill. This does not seem to be clearly so in the scientist, the naturalist, who limits himself to knowing only his own half of reality, as he concentrates all his suppositions, his preconceptions in his study of nature, limiting himself then to demonstrating their validity. But this way he doesn't know, he merely demonstrates. Nature, in spiritual terms, is Just touched upon by him, but in practical terms, it is violated. The merit of Romanticism, in our case of Novalis, undoubtedly lies in its having intuited the danger that nature and man were headed for, if, hypothetically, man had continued in a partial perspective, thus limiting the freedom of both. And yet Novalis wrote a good while before the Industrial Revolution started to take off, before the new social equilibrium that arose from the birth of the middle class, before the theories of Positivism and 316

following pages Joseph Beuys working on the Diary of Seychelles operation. ?raslin, December 1980

Materialism heavily influenced the development of Western culture at the end of the 19th century, and thus in the 20th and 21st centuries. Well before his time, Novalis intuited the devastating potential that the concept of science could have assumed in a perspective of this kind. And Beuys was also aware of this: in 1984, in Bolognano, during the Defence of Nature discussion his words were as follows: Beuys: So changes in nature have already resulted from the activities of human creativity, and this positivistic and materialistic form of exploitative creativity has already run its course. What we have to do then is to take the next step and to bring about a change of direction. One kind of alteration has already taken place, and the new alterations that have to be undertaken are intimately connected with what we can call the decay of nature and the decay of nature's evolutionary power. lt seems to me too that we also have to understand that the life and the evolutionary power of this planet are already very old. This planet, this earth that sometimes convulses with earthquakes, is already quite old in spite of that. So from the organic and ecological points of view, we have to come to nature's assistance in a therapeutic kind of way. And this therapeutic way of working in nature means that every form of nature that can exist after the crisis of total and totally negative materialism must necessarily be a question of a world produced by human beings. Hence, Beuys set great store by the suggestions he received from the distant Novalis, but at the same time his attitude was a very concrete one, a practical and decidedly more realistic one. But most importantly, he didn't want to regress, he didn't want to go back to the past, to the greatly admired Golden Age. Beuys looked forward to the future and perceived therein a chance for man to regain anthropological unity, which meant: with nature and with himself. For the German Master this was the only true possibility, in that it is evolution, it is progress. What logically ensues, to go back to the subject of science, is that it does not constitute a threat in itself; only if it were conceived in an arbitrary and restricted way would it become something potentially dangerous. Alas, this has indeed occurred, and at any rate not only in the field of the sciences, but in almost every other field as well, not least in the field of art. For Beuys, then, the only way out is to enforce, from an organic standpoint, a process of transformation, of growth that can lead to the expansion of the different cognitive concepts by now instilled in the mindset of Western man.

Beuys: / would like to stress again that it was never my intention to do away with positivistic or materialistic concepts of knowledge; on the contrary, it can be shown that | even celebrate these things— however l only celebrate them as a transitory situation in its sectorial existence, in its one-sidedness, and in the results, naturally, that it has gloriously achieved. 317

When | take the scientific concept in its necessary reduction of char acter along with democracy as a contemporary form of societyr—two forms which have developed parallel to each other—vvith pictures under consideration whose phenotypes have already appeared earlier and under other cireumstances | do not want to go away from modern achievements, | want to go closer to them, | want to expand in that | attempt to create a larger basis for understanding. If| want to expand a scientific concept, | do not want to do away with it. | only want to point to its sectorial existence, to its limited char acter, and at the same time point to how necessary it was that this limitation of character take place. Through this process man would be brought to a thought discipline which would stimulate his own activity so greatly that it would become a liberating process, that is, he would find himself independent from God, from old associations; but the fact that he must find these connections on a higher plane, after he has been, so to speak, liberated, is very clear. The problem is that one methodologically elucidates the doubtful sectorial existence of a scientific concept through this, in that one demonstrates the phenotype in pictures of the past to make clear that there are other references and much greater connections. The problem can only be solved in that one always questions again which methodology is suitable to address all of these complex questions, first to call them forth and secondly to address their centers. Had | expressed all this in recognizably logical statements, in a book, for example, it would not have been successful, because modern man is inclined only to satisfy his intellect and to understand everything according to the laws of logic. But it was not up to me to unilaterally address logic, it was up to me to break off all the residues present in the subconscious and to transfer a chaotically detached orderly procedure into turbulence; the beginning of the new always takes place in chaos.

Thus Beuys's words mainly hinge upon the problem which is always progressive and never regressive.

of evolution,

Beuys: ... /f by progress we mean the development of humanity, as human totality, then | believe in progress. For mankind this means a very mental and spiritual concept as an end, which takes the place of faith in material progress. And this is a mental end that frees men more and more from their material ties. In other words, it is man himself who rises up to a level of superior existence. It is not just a question of believing in technological progress, but of being aware of the possibilities of the development and expansion of mankind to the highest level of consciousness.

... lam not a Darwinian. So | am not talking about the Darwinian evolution or Haeckel's theories, in spite of the fact that there are many interesting things about them. I dont think that man descends from animals. From the very beginning man was the end. But to realize this idea on earth many ex 320

periments were needed, because the idea of man did not exist in a physical guise. Animals are victims: in fact, they have been sacrificed to man. It is thanks to them that man current physical appearance Is what it is. The monkey narrowly missed out on being a man. That is why animals must be our friends...

... Industrial manufacturing has also produced some brilliant inventions. Just think of Thomas Telford, and Brunel, and their wonderful bridges. Or think of what has been accomplished in the field of ar chitecture. As a matter of fact, even the atomic bomb is a miracle of human creativity. If we manage to dominate the forces, then these too are marvels. ... Primitive indigenous populations have become liable to seduction because tribal cultures are no longer worth anything nowadays; they are decadent, even if they still inhabit a virgin forest. Strength and internal stability are lacking now. And if they run into something that might be convenient, such as television, they will see it as some kind of miracle. Old tribal cultures, based on blood ties and not on ties of love or spiritual affinity, have rightly come to an end and must vanish. All of these things—a case in point being Native American culture— which are kept together as though they were a series of museum pieces, is just sentimentalism. lt would be better if these people could evolve and grow. But of course they become slaves to capital ism and end up dying out. These statements clearly show how careful we must be when we speak of ecology in Beuys. Beuys is not the ecologist who, with simplistic and instrumental attitude, rejects all that is modern or the fruit of progress in technology as something “bad! What he believes is that man must limit his evolutionary potential for industrial and technological development. And it is because of this position that we can call him a Romantic. Moreover, we need to emphasize the fact that Beuys detests any form of base sentimentalism, any decadent attitude; indeed in terms of nature this is resolved in an aboulic and substantially impotent state, vvhich causes man to collapse into conditions of total ineptitude and inactivity. Instead, man must use his own creative energies, he must place them at the service of the previously mentioned therapeutic work in favour of nature. In the final analysis, a nostalgic attitude towards nature, the vearning for a sort of harmony that in the distant past reigned amidst man and nature, features expressed by the Romantic poets, are all alien to Beuys's thinking. He prefers the present as the reality of a life that man experiences in all its complexity. And the present is at the service of the future; Beuys holds that it is necessary to get involved so that in the future the life of all humanity will be improved. This concept is not to be interpreted as a process that is carried out in the sign of pragmatism; let's not forget the inexorable 321

need to completely expand the spectrum of the creative potential that resides in the mind, the heart and the will of man. But there is one further point that we cannot overlook. When Beuys speaks of ties of love and spiritual affinity that are supposedly not at the basis of the culture of primitive societies, what he means is that for future society love itself will have to be a prerequisite, both in the relationship between man and his equals, and in that between man and nature. Beuys: Love would really need a much larger area of activity. lm not interested in an Eros reduced to the bourgeois understanding of a biological relationship between people. Love is the great secret. Eros remains bourgeois to the extent that it remains a selfish inter est. But today we have to transform this individualistic Eros into a social Eros. This topic has hardly ever been dealt with. As for Beuys, he rarely broached the subject in an explicit way; | believe that all his work invokes self-love as Plato defined it: “The extreme desire to possess good” revealing it in its entire existence at the service of a better society. Nonetheless, we can say that /ove is the great secret, and it was to this sentiment that Beuys undoubtedly turned his particular, and certainly more than fortuitous, attention. But perhaps we shouldn't call it sentiment. Love for Beuys is energy, it is energy itself. lt could just be a supposition on my part, but it intensifies when we find ourselves standing before one of his works and... his life. At that point it becomes a certainty: we are filled with love. Beuys: Instead of undefined sympathy or antipathy, the observer develops a third sensation: it is simply called interest. Interest in an intensified form can lead to love. The scandal does not take place.

Could love then be the true key to a reading and interpretation of Beuys? Perhaps we could have a clearer idea after reading another passage from Novalis, actually a “fairy tale” included in his essay Nature: “Long long ago, far towards the setting sun, there lived a youth. He was good and kind, but very very strange. He spent his days grieving and pining, and always for no cause; he went about in silence or sat alone when the others played and made merry, and he followed after strange lore. Caverns and woods were his favoured abode, and all the while he spoke with the beasts and birds, with trees and rocks,

and as you may imagine he never said a sensible word, but such nonsense you would have laughed had you heard it. Yet he was always morose and solemn, although the birds did their very best to distract him and show him the right way. The goose told fairy tales, the brook strummed a ballad, a big fat boulder gambolled like a billygoat, the rose crept up behind him and twined herself in his hair, and 322

the ivy caressed his careworn brow. But his sulkiness was stubborn. His mother and father were sorely distressed, they had no idea what to do. His health was good, he ate well, they had done nothing to vex him, and up to a few years before, he had been happy and gay as no other, first in every game and admired by all the girls. He was very handsome, as though an artist had painted him, and he danced like an angel. Among the girls there was one, a fair, delightful child, with hair like golden silk and lips like cherries; her figure was that of a doll, and she had coal-black eyes. Such was her loveliness that he who saw her might have swooned away. In those days Rose Petal, for that was her name, loved Hyacinth (which was his name) with all her heart; and he loved her in return. The other children knew nothing of it. A little violet was the first to tell them; the hens had noticed it too, for their parents' homes stood near each other. At night when Hyacinth stood at his window, and Rose Petal at hers, the cats that ran by chasing after mice saw the two of them standing there and often they laughed so loud that the two lovers heard them and grew angry. The violet had told it to the strawberry in confidence, and the strawberry told it to her friend the gooseberry, and thus the whole garden soon learned of it and the forest too, and when Hyacinth went out, cries assailed him from all sides; ‘Rose Petal is my sweetheart!' Now Hyacinth was angry, yet he could not help laughing with all his heart when the lizard came sliding along, sat down on a warm stone, wagged his tail and sang: Poor little Rose Petal, good and kind, Suddenly was stricken blind, Her mother Hyacinth she thought, So round his neck became entwined, But when she felt the face was strange,

Just think—no terror made her change! But on his cheek pressed she her kiss And she had noted naught amiss... Alas, how soon did all this bliss pass away! There came along a man from foreign lands; he had travelled everywhere, had a long beard, deep-set eyes, terrible evebrows, and strange figures on the clothes he wore. He seated himself in front of the house that belonged to Hyacinth's parents. Now Hyacinth was very curious and fetched him bread and wine. The man told stories until late at night and Hyacinth never tired of listening. As far as one could learn afterwards the man had related much about foreign lands, unknown regions, astonishingly wondrous things, staying there with Hyacinth three days, and creeping down into deep pits. Rose Petal cursed the old sorcerer, for Hyacinth was all eagerness for his tales and cared for nothing, scarcely even eating a little food. Finally the man took his departure, not, however, without leaving Hyacinth a booklet that not a soul could read. The youth had given him fruit, bread, and wine to take along and had accompanied him a long way. Then he came back changed and began an entirely new mode of life. Rose Petal showered him with af323

fection, but from that time on he paid little attention to her and always kept to himself. Now it came about that he returned home one day and was like a new-born. He fell on his parents’ neck and wept. ‘l must depart for foreign lands/ he said; a strange old woman in the forest had given him the advice to burn the booklet and leave, only by doing so could he get well again. He asked his parents for their blessing and promised he would soon be back, or never more. He said that he could do no differently and asked his mother and father to say goodbye to Rose Petal for him. He could no longer find peace, something was driving him away; his heart and his love were no longer there, he absolutely had to leave to find them again, but he knew not where. ‘There where dwells the mother of all things, the Veiled Virgin. For her my heart burns. Farewelll' He tore himself away from his parents, who lamented and shed tears, and departed. Rose Petal kept in her chamber and wept bitterly. Hyacinth now hastened as fast as he could through valleys and forests, across Mountains and streams, towards the mysterious country. Everywhere he asked men and animals, rocks and trees, for the Sacred goddess (Isis). Some laughed, some were silent, nowhere did he receive an answer. At first he passed through wild, uninhabited regions, mist and clouds obstructed his path, it was always windy. Later he found unbounded deserts of glowing hot sand, and as he wandered his mood changed, time seemed to grow longer, and his inner unrest was calmed. He became more tranquil and the violent excitement within him was gradually transformed into a gentle but strong impulse, which took possession of his whole nature. Now, too, the region was once again rich and varied, the air mild and blue, the path more level, green bushes lured him with comforting shade, but he did not understand their language, they seemed indeed not to speak, and yet they filled his heart with green colour and a cool stillness. Higher and higher rose the sweet yearning in him, greener became the leaves, merrier the birds, more fragrant the fruits, warmer the air, darker the sky, and more ardent his love; the time passed faster and faster, as though he felt his goal to be close at hand. One day he met a crystal spring and a throng of flowers coming down into a valley between black pillars. They greeted him with friendly, familiar words. ‘Dear compatriots/ he said, ‘where shall | find the hallowed abode of Isis? It must be nearby, and perhaps you know this region better than |‘ ‘We are only passing through, the flowers replied'; ‘a family of spirits is going on a journey, and we are preparing their path, but not long ago we passed through a place where we heard her name. Just climb to the place we come from and you will learn more! The flowers and the spring laughed as they spoke these words, and of-

fered him something fresh to drink as they continued along their way. Hyacinth took their advice, asking and then asking again, until the finally came to the yearned-for abode, hidden amidst the palms and many beautiful plants. His heart started to beat with nostalgia, and sweet sadness came over him in this abode of the eternal seasons. Surrounded by divine fragrances he fell asleep, because the only way 324

for him to reach the Holy One was through a dream. Curiously, the dream led him to enormous rooms filled with strange objects, which accompanied him with their heavenly music: it all seemed so familiar to him—but too magnificent; even the last semblance of reality vanished and he found himself before the Celestial Virgin. So she lifted the gossamer, shimmering veil and Rose Petal rushed into his arms. A strain of sweet music accompanied the secret of loving vision, their yearning and nostalgia banished all that was alien from this enchanting spot. After that Hyacinth lived with Rose Petal many years, together with his happy mother and father and friends—and a flurry of grandchildren thanked that funny old lady for her advice to burn the booklet. Because from that day on all mankind received the gift of many children, as many as they wished” The meaning of this tale is quite simple; the search for the good that has been lost, the burning desire for the unknown, in the end lead to regaining only what we already possess but have forgotten. Hyacinth, in his liberating dream, sees Rose Petal once more. His separation from home and his long journey are none other than a return home. But perhaps there is yet another level of meaning, if we wish to go into the story in greater detail, and this can undoubtedly be of help to US. Novalis's story has two salient elements. The first is actually the theme itself, that is, love. Love is everywhere and it moves everything and everybody: the cats laugh about it, the violet tells the strawberry, all the forest knows about it and in jest sings about it to the lizard; love makes Hyacinth angry, but it also makes him rejoice. Then love and happiness depart and in their place they leave the second salient element, which is represented by the booklet. This might seem to be of minor importance, but it isn't if we consider how the story ends, with its reappearance (“..for her advice that he burn the booklet”). What is the meaning of the booklet? We knoW that only Hyacinth is capable of reading it, and that this causes his feeling of deep unhappiness, his wise and voluntary solitude. Clearly, the booklet and love are two elements that Novalis wanted to characterize in opposition: if we refer back to the passage on the sci entist and the poet that we read just before, we can clearly see how the latter become metaphors, which are in turn almed at the booklet and love, respectively. Hyacinth wants to learn, but he overlooks the most important thing; he wants to know, but he forgets all the rest; he wants to understand,

following pages Beuys at the Obenmancienne farm working on the Diary of Seychelles operation. Praslin, December 1980

but the secret of his loving vision can no longer understand the voices of nature; he wants to see, investigate, but he becomes blind and can't make head or tail of anything. Hyacinth is a modern man. And this is where Beuys comes in. Let's think once more about the Theory of Sculpture and the continuous process that takes place therein. This movement from chaos to form, from disorder to order must take place in each and every man, because for him it means self-consciousness and creative energy. It's just that he must not stop once he has achieved the goal he had 325

set for himself, because in that case, in the order of the intellectual lo-

cus, debris would be deposited and, by precipitating, lead to the crystallization of thinking itself.Let's think about Steiner's words, which may be useful to us in regard to this very concept:

“.. our lives are based on this, the fact that continually, from top to bottom, we wish to form hexagonal crystals, but we will not allow this to happen ...’ Anyone who does allow this to happen becomes

like burnt debris. To put it in terms of Beuysian thinking, “it falls outside the system.” Hyacinth has clearly left the system. Proof of this lies in the fact that he can no longer establish contacts with his peers and with the world around him; in the final analysis, not even with himself. Hyacinth is destroying his own life. So what does he do? He burns the booklet and sets out on his journey, and thus in movement. This journey, transported into the Theory of Sculpture, undoubtedly becomes movement, the introduction of that rhythmical measure that sets the pace for the vital process between the two poles of wi/l and thinking. Beuys calls it sentiment, soul. And Hyacinth, at the end of his voyage, what does he find? He finds Rose Petal, he finds love. And therefore he finds his soul. Perhaps the meaning of the words /ove /s the great secret is finally revealed to us. Let's go back to Novalis for a moment: "Rose Petal rushed into his arms. Sweet music was all around them... Hence, what's Important here is not the discovery of the secret of love, but the acknowledgement in the depth of one's heart that there is a secret as concerns love. This is something to be rediscovered and reawakened constantly, because it means living. But what is also extraordinary and marvellous is the fact that Hyacinth, more than any other thing, sees Rose Petal once more (“the secret of loving vision”). This aspect, in speaking, better still, referring to Beuys, cannot leave us unmovedì: it means that to see and read Beuys's work, more than “ anything else, a good dose of love is needed. Beuys: /nterest, in an intensified form, can lead to love. There is nothIng scandalous about it.

Only he who considers himself to be free is destined to create history

(Joseph Beuys) Beuys and Steiner

Humanity has a choice, either to go back and learn from all the fields in existence, starting from the whole natural context, from the whole cosmic context, or else it can lead to the degeneration and death of the life of man and of Nature (R. Steiner) 328

Beuys himself, on numerous occasions, pointed to Rudolf Steiner as his model. The existence of significant fields of analogy, real and evident ones, allows us to contemplate their thinking side by side. VVho was Rudolf Steiner? We could reply by saying he was a scientist, an artist, a publisher, but most importantly he was the founder of the spiritual movement known as “Anthroposophy/ which is still active today in Europe and the United States. Steiner was a master, a true pacifist, who believed in the mission of individual souls, as we shall see further on. Born in Kraljevic, Austria, in 1861, from a very early age he was greatly interested in poetics and the beliefs expressed by the deepest Romanticism, especially as concerned the figure of Johann Wolfgang Goethe, whom he revered. Steiner was appointed to direct the Goethe Archive and curated Goethian works on the natural sciences. He also published Goethe's scientific works and collaborated on the official edition of the German thinker's complete works. In Berlin Steiner founded the literary journal Magazin fur Literatur. He gave lessons and delivered lectures in a school for factory workers. Although he was already in contact with the members of the Theosophical Society, in 1912 Steiner set up his Anthroposophical Society. The idea underpinning his thinking was indeed that of so-called “anthroposophy," which signifies knowledge produced by the loftiest part of man, a sort of spiritual perception that responds to the transcendental senses of the human being. He also believed that originally man's consciousness was freer and more sensitive to the forces of the imagination, and this allowed him to participate more fully in the spiritual processes of the world. Steiner believed that the disturbing element that compromises the full development of human consciousness can be traced back to contemporary man's tendency to articulate his knowledge upon exclusively rational and measurable foundations according to the parameters of exact science, as well as to his consequent attachment to material goods as seen from an abstract and subjective viewpoint. This would lead to the need to train human consciousness by exercising the intellect, for a renewed perception of spiritual essence. Indeed Steiner believed that this capacity is innate in every man. Hence,

in Dornach,

close to Basel,

in 1913, Steiner built his first

Goetheanum, which he described as a “School of Spiritual science. He died in Dornach in 1925. The Waldorf School Movement arose from Steiner's experiences, and in 1969 it boasted some eighty schools, with over 25,000 children enrolled, from Europe to the United States. Other projects which developed thanks to Steiner's work include schools for children with special needs, a therapy clinic in Switzerland, science and maths research centres, schools that teach drama, acting, painting, sculpture, as well as eurhythmy, the art of rhythmic movement that also involves acting and singing. It was FR. Rothenburg, who died at the Nazi concentration camp of Sachsenhausen, who first suggested to Beuys that he should read Steiner's writings, including The Philosophy of Freedom, The Philoso329

phy of Spiritual Activity and An Outline of Occult Science. But Beuys had to wait until the war was over to be able to go back to these books and read them from a different, fresher standpoint. Beuys: At that time it was hard for me to feel an interest in Steiner's anthroposophical ideas. It was only after the end of the war, in 1945 or 1946, that | actually went back to Steiner's works and was very impressed with what | read, especially with his correct, profound knowledge of scientific questions. His ideas developed a tendency that was directly and concretely linked to reality and in relation to which every form of scientific and theoretical discussion remains without any direct contact with the forces of time. Thus, Beuys saw in Steiner's work a precious suggestion that was contrary to the tendency to abstract the terms of scientific knowledge, on the one hand, and to understand life only as it is affected by materialism, on the other. The specific considerations that Steiner analyzes in the field of the natural sciences are indeed what first drew Beuys's attention. As a matter of fact, we know of Steiner's interest in the early 1950s in the subject of bees, which would in time become one of the topics he discussed more frequently. This is part of the lecture on bees that Steiner gave at the Dornach Goetheanum in 1923: “In ancient times Bees were considered sacred animals. This is because in all of their activity they demonstrate the same thing that happens in the human body. If we think about a small piece of beeswax, we see that it is truly an intermediate product between blood, muscles and bones. lt penetrates into man's most intimate part at the waxen state. This way the wax doesn't yet become solid but remains fluid so that it can be transported to the blood, the muscles, or the bone cells. So what we have in the wax is the same as what we have inside us, which from the outside is seen as strength or energy. When the people of the past made wax crosses and then set them on fire, they definitely saw this action as something profoundly sacred. When the fire melted the wax and allowed it to evaporate, then the wax achieved the same condition that exists in the human body. They imagined that what rose up into the sky from the burning wax was a part of their bodies. It was an act of special devotion that led them to see bees as particularly sacred animals, because they prepared something that even man continually elaborates in his own body. If we think about it, we realize that the more we go back in time, the more we find that people worshipped the entire essence of the bee. People discovered it and looked upon it as a revelation. Later it was brought to the homes of men. But there are lots of other interesting observations that have to do with bees. There is a great deal to study that can be useful to man. The worker bees bring to their hive what they gather from plants and transform it into wax inside their bodies; then they make cell-shaped constructions that are truly amazing. But the blood cells behave the same way in man. They go from the head to the whole human body. And if we consider, for example, a bone, a bony fragment, we note 330

that there are hexagonal cells everywhere inside. The blood that cir culates in the body has the same function that the bees have in the hive. Likewise in the muscles something similar takes place, except that as the blood dissolves right away, the muscles remain at a fluid state. None of this is easy to appreciate, while it is very clear to see when you study bones. So blood has the same power as worker bees. Another point. The quartz you find in mountains is one of the hardest substances. But substances are not equal in all the places we find them. Inside man's body is the exact same substance as quartz, but in a more fluid form. You see, it is very interesting to carefully examine—you have to correctly go through an inner research— vhat constantly runs from the head, down to the lower limbs. From the head downwards the same substance falls as what the earth once let flow from inside to outside, which then solidified and was deposited in the form of quartz crystals, for instance. From deep inside the earth substances come gushing out. The same thing takes place in man, from the head it runs down the whole body. It is either quartz or salicylic acid. Only the human body does not allow quartz to crystallize: our life is based on this, everything takes place continually, from top to bottom, we want to form hexagonal crystals, but we won't let this happen... People, let's look at the bees. The bee flies, it gathers honey. Inside its body it produces honey, which is the bee's vital energy. Bees also prepare wax. What do they do with this wax? They make hexagonal cells. You see, the earth produces hexagonal crystals of salicylic acid and the bees also make hexagonal cells. This is extremely interesting. If | could show you the bees' cells, these would be like quartz crystals, but they're actually empty. Quartz isn't empty. Yet they are identical in shape. Beuys had just come back from the war and he was feeling disappointed with science, his “first love," because of its academicism and cold unyielding nature. For this reason he decided to dedicate himself to art and that alone. A reading of Steiner undoubtedly conveyed to him stimuli that were to influence all of his future research. \Vhich elements was Beuys interested in? First of all, the belief, which he shared with Steiner, in the need not to have just a rational mindset but especially a spiritual one in the face of reality. If man restricts his perceptive faculties to the probative criterion of mathematical precision, he will then impoverish the spiritual wealth that he could receive from a broader understanding of reality. Beuys: VVe need to invent reality. This is what | believe my art to be: when | see the world, it consists of many levels of reality if compared to what the person who is a materialist might admit. This restricted vision, the yearning for everything to be reasoned on and demonstrated by following materialist criteria and that alone does not reveal the whole breadth of so-called reality. So | always begin my informative talks and my political meetings with this question: which reality are we actually dealing with? 331

Beuys's statement is echoed in something Steiner wrote which focuses on the profound difference that exists between Western man and Eastern man, and on the ensuing way of observing reality. It is common knowledge that Beuys's works often dealt with the divide between

East and West, for instance in Eurasia and Eurasien-

stab, previously discussed in the Second Station. This is how Steiner put it: “Oriental man does not have a sense for proof. By observing, he tests the contents of his truths and through this gets to know them. And one does not need to prove what one knows. Western man is constantly asking for ‘proofs‘ By letting his thoughts run free he fights against the contents of his truths, beginning from outer appearance; this is how he interprets them. But everything we interpret must be proven. If Western man could free life from the truth of his proofs, then Eastern man would be able to understand him. The day that Eastern man finds his dreams of truth in an actual reawakening, which can only take place when Western man's interest in proving is no longer, then Western man will be able to hail Eastern man as a collaborator in the task of human progress, as one who can bring about what he himself is incapable of” The second element stems from this. If we observe reality we will realize that nature is an unending treasure trove of information for us, which is further extended at every level. This is also so for Steiner when he speaks of bees and the work they do, or quartz crystals; we can say the same for Beuys when he turns natural substances into the key players, right alongside himself, in the work of art. Practically speaking, Nature is a metaphor for man. This general idea of reality allows for a range of action that is actually unlimited because it spreads out to every possible field of interrelationship between Man and Nature. It is at this point that the third element is introduced into Beuys's work, much like a shoot that by developing will lead him to the ultimate formulation of his theories, that is, to the Theory of Sculpture. Steiner's ideas were certainly essential for this evolution in Beuys's work. Furthermore, Steiner himself, as we saw before, wanted to make his ideas concrete by founding organizations that would promote initiatives in the field of pedagogy, in scientific and artistic research, but with special attention to society's and people's requests. This is indeed how he came to turn to the German people in 1919, and at that precise moment in history launch an appeal for new concepts. That was when he founded a very interesting organization: the Triple Alliance for the Articulation of the Social Organism. Steiner was a pacifist who believed in the mission of the individual souls of the people—his heartfelt appeal to the German nation is based on this—where he suggested casting light on the true reasons for the First World War, on the one hand, and the errors that humanity should never again commit, on the other. Steiner stated that: “Either we deign to submit ourselves with our thinking to the needs of reality, or we shall have learned nothing from the horrors of war. Rather, we shall further and endlessly worsen all the evil that we have already caused” 332

Following the great interest shown by the working classes, he promoted a long series of lectures on the topic “Support for the development of social education and justice” At this point it might be especially interesting to listen to Beuys's voice. Beuys believed that Steiner wanted to set up an organization that would eventually create the grounds for a new social organism. One of the members of Steiner's organization was Lehmbruck (he died the same year Steiner first set up his organization, in 1919): “.. it is as if he wanted to transmit this wish. This flame that he then wanted to entrust to others, at the very last instant of his life, when he had crossed the threshold of the death of his own sculpture ... In this reconstruction, Beuys found that the gesture of the handing over of the “Flame” represented in Lehmbruck was expressed at a time that is still relevant today, and that many should see it as the groundwork for that renewal of society overall that leads to Social Sculpture. At this point we need to recall Beuys's great admiration for Lehmbruck, who was his master; he believed that ... Lehmbruck's outstanding work touches on an extreme situation of the concept of sculpture ... Here is a part of the speech Beuys made, previously reproduced in the Second Station, just a few days before dying, when he was awarded the Lehmbruch prize: ... VVell, |am proud to affirm that | am aligned on the side on which Wilhelm Lehmbruck lived and died, and whence he sent us his last message, addressing it to each one of us: “Protect the flame," because if it is not protected it will be blown out by the wind before we know it, that same wind which had lit it. And then poor, poor heart it will be the end for you, petrified by pain and grief...

following pages Joseph Beuys, on the Cousiine island working on the Diary of Seychelles operation, December 1980

Personal note. This is a message replete with meaning that Beuys left for all of us. Those of us who have had the good fortune to be nourished and to have grown with the energy and spirit of his Noble Thought. Those of us who have received the privilege of the sacred mission Protect the Flame. But who will protect the Flame once we are gone? In the tragedies of my life, optimism has always accompanied my very existence, bestowing meaning upon my actions. So | believe that there will always be men capable of penetrating into the reign of visibility that is not accessible to the ephemeral eye, capable of giving with their own activity shape to the visible and that ... | am sure, will know how to protect the Flame. An attempt, for the future of a better Society. For a new Art. Beuys Art. The Art of the Free Man. Going back to Beuys, all of this was to constitute a pivotal point in his philosophy. Thus, the most important element that Beuys takes from Steiner's 333

political ideas is undoubtedly the concept of self-administration and the three structures: State, Economy,

Intellectual Life.

This concept, we have seen, lays the foundation for the organizations founded by Beuys, where, among other things, we often find collaborative efforts with members of some anthroposophical group. But clearly the intention is not that of being involved in organizations that are all told sectarian, but of being able to exchange, in a fruitful meeting for both parties, experiences and materials to study and on which to reflect. Beuys: As for anthroposophy, there are some very interesting aspects in regard to the selFadministration of the social body, and we can use them. In some of the smaller anthroposophical groups there are people who are seriously interested in organic ecological solutions. But generally this is not so because the majority of the so-called anthroposophical society is against our movement because it is a sort of sect with its own dogmatism. Only a restricted group is favourable to an open discussion, to exchanges concerning current issues, and not just to a personal exchange. Hence, in the various groups, in Germany and throughout the world, there are specific political problems we need to discuss with them. Beuys does not believe in a cultural aristocracy, in a hierarchical structuring of what were historically believed to be ideas and their development. On the other hand, the substantial difference can be found, to my mind, in the typology of the two different organizations: Steiner founded Goetheanum, an elite organization, while Beuys established the Free International University (FI.U.). This history of culture is a universal heritage to which each and every one of us can gain access, with complete freedom to express an opinion on the individual episodes. Of course, Beuys's attitude is critical, and this is also confirmed in his personal interpretations of figures like Leonardo and Galileo, but this does not mean that he arbitrarily feels his own opinion to be the only valid one. What really counts is a truly inner reflection, a capacity for self-introspection that allows men to judge reality objectively, and to know how to discern the finest of the many models. The theoretical models that are eventually chosen beforehand certainly do not need to be raised to the rank of absolute truth, of dogma to be obeyed passively from end to end. On the contrary, they are open to discussion, they should be compared, improved depending on what's needed. Not, by virtue of their nature, many isolated pearls, but rather a pearl necklace that man must lengthen and improve. This is man's evolution. This is the development of Culture. This is why Beuys cannot view any one figure in cultural history as being unique. Steiner, who is actually a model for him, is in fact seen as part of a 336

long line of thinking that goes backwards in time and in which many other figures can be distinguished. Beuys believes that to provide a solution to all these problems we need to be well aware of the proposals made, because they already exist in German anthropology's Romantic past: Goethe, Hegel, Schelling, Novalis, Steiner... These world-class thinkers had already indicated a direction, but they were overcome by materialist tendencies. Beuys believes that the creation of a new viewpoint is viable. On the other hand, Steiner himself had started out right from his study of Goethe's thinking and was then able to elaborate his own original proposals; and Beuys too started out from Steiner, thus implicitly stating that it's not so much a question of inventing who knows what, but of having a new point of view. This mindset alone, which is not a falsely modest one, but just a human one, allows for that revolution of ideas that makes up the prerequisite for each true evolutionary development in man, in its various aspects. But Beuys, in the words reported above, mentioned other figures besides Steiner. And all of them, except for Hegel, were the foremost exponents of Romantic philosophy, poetry and literature, a period that Beuys especially cherished. Throughout his lite Beuys pursued two essential research strands, which he always saw with a “diamond's-eye,’ that is, a multifaceted view: a scientific one involving a profound knowledge and awareness in terms of botany and zoology, and an artistic one understood as freedom from materialism for an energetic creative development. We shall discuss the existence of references to Romantic thought in Beuys in the second and third paragraphs in this station. It is worthwhile stating that thanks to “rare men” separate from all other men we have had the privilege of seeing what the common spirit does not see: their spirit of sociability and permanent presence. An absolute spirit, the result of a critical unyieldingness of every positivity, of every criterion of truth, of every localization of truth. “The time is long, but the Truth will come” (Friedrich Hòlderlin) and ... Beuys's Voice is the Present Time. Work of love. On the Earth, people, animals, plants, mountains, rivers, winds, lights, that by bursting in resemble one another. Signs on us are enough, Christianity bursts in through Christ power in me. To lift ones eyes like a new being, expanding in one great breath. He needs to find himself. Without ending the whole conversion and in the blood of love, and radiating with liberation, weaving inductive pharmacy, metamorphosis of thought. Between 1942 and 1944, the young Beuys wrote this poem on a simple piece of notebook paper beside a watercolour. 337

Beuys and Schelling

When we discussed the exponents of the so-called “Jena Group, we also mentioned the name of the philosopher Friedrich Wilhelm Schelling. As is well-known, Schelling is universally considered to be one of the three figures that breathed life into the dialectic development of the doctrine of German Idealism. The other two names that must be stressed are Immanuel Hermann Fichte and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. In philosophical terminology, the definitions by which Fichte's work constitutes subjective idealism, Schelling's objective idealism, and Hegel's absolute idealism are generally accepted. We shall deal with this topic later on. For the time being it is interesting to observe the relationship between Schelling and the Romantic circle, as the vision of a conception, which is by nature poetical, as part of the one that can be defined a theoretical, systematic formulation is viable. Worthy of note, to this regard, is the opinion of Nicolai Hartmann, a German philosopher who died in 1950: “.. And philosophy? In the circle of the Romantics each individual was a philosopher in his own right. Each one of them gave a more or less conceptual slant to his intuitions. But these attempts that each one of them carried out on his own initiative have something weak, amateurish about them; they are incapable of holding up before the great philosophical problems of the time and their famous and expert thinkers. Nor could they achieve true speculative greatness of what in essence was clearly intuited, but that formally presented itself in their eyes as being obscurely prophesied. We cannot overlook the fact that the philosophical attempts made by the Romantics, despite the fact that each one of them was a genius, are ultimately diminished by their ideas. Something of the true content of these ideas flashes at times in daring images and apparitions or in bold aphorisms... Naturally, with true philosophers things are quite different. Schelling and Schleiermacher were the closest to the Romantic circle. Not only did both of these men receive from it the stimuli that lasted the longest, but they welcomed whole parts of the Romantic world into their systems. The same can be said, although within certain limits, for Fichte, specifically for his later work, and for Hegel, despite all the distances from the most restricted circle. But these philosophers were very far from simply being Romantics” Unsurprisingly, when we spoke about Novalis earlier on, we chose to do so through a fairy tale rather than through passages from his essays; hence, in a certain sense, through poetry. But Hartmann's words must be taken with a pinch of salt: if it is true that poetry, like every other artistic discipline, cannot be like philosophy from end to end—and vice versa—it is also true that philosophy alone is not capable of arriving at a wholly satisfactory understanding of reality. There are, in fact, numerous pathways to express such an understanding and if they are genuine and sincere they are all valid. Now that we have made this point clearer, we can state that, in truth, schelling's philosophy is extremely useful, as it no doubt constitutes the most exhaustive and most articulated system to have been con-

ceived of in the Romantic age. As such, it offers further interesting

338

terms of comparison in Beuys. But first we should perhaps listen to what Beuys's opinion on the subject is: Beuys: Actually, this story, where we talk about me as a continuer of German ldealism, should really be modified; on the other hand, a proper analysis of what was to be the function of German ldealism has never been carried out; that is, how actual historical application might only have had a series of idealistic studies as a result. So this is the problem: first, that the meaningful root that substantially directly linked idealism to realism has never been acknowledged; in general, instead, it was believed that realism was linked to scientific material ism, with the precision of scientific doctrines...; the truth of the matter instead being that materialism could not completely cover man and nature. | never said | was an idealist! Actually, | have always been given the role of the idealist, but in truth I am misunderstood precisely because | am talking about a new concept where true realism coincides with idealism and, vice versa, true idealism coincides with realism. There are some concepts of idealism-realism and some concepts of realism-idealism for a broader concept that | indicate as phenomenology. Phenomenology means this: the phenomenological data of life, reality, are perceived by the various aspects of real life. Beuys, then, is careful to specify the distance between his thinking and that of the philosophers of idealism. But at the same time, he states that the bearing of such thinking has never been completely appreciated and, more importantly, that the realistic character contained therein has never been studied enough. So when Beuys says that the concept he meant to express had been misconstrued, to my mind, it is impossible not to immediately think of the figure of Friedrich Schelling, who in every single textbook on the history of philosophy is always being relegated to the role of antithesis, to that which will then become dialectic development in the Hegelian system. But apart from everything else, however, | would never take the liberty of advancing a parallel of this kind if Beuys himself had not already raised these issues, i.e. those concerning the concepts of idealism-realism and realism-idealism, which, as | shall show, very often come up in Schelling's thought as well. Brie fly, his life story. Friedrich Schelling was born in 1775 in Leonberg in the German region of Wurttenburg in the Weimar Republic. At first he studied theology at the seminary in Tubingen, together with Hegel and the famous Romantic poet Friederich Hélderlin, and then he went on to study maths and science in Leipzig. Later, he attended the philosophy courses that Fichte was teaching at the University of Jena, having been influenced by him in his early work as an elaborator of personal ideas. He also studied the works of Kant and Spinoza deeply. In 1798, at the age of 24, thanks to the support he received from Goethe, he took over the University of Jena's chair of philosophy that had been Fichte's until then, and stayed there until 1803. These were the happiest and most fruitful years for Schelling, and it was also the period when he 339

cultivated his relationship with the Romantic circle. The next stages in his career as a university professor were in Wurzburg, from 1803 to 1806, in Munich and Erlangen, until 1841, and, finally, in Berlin, where

he taught until 1847 having been appointed the chair that had been Hegel's. He died in 1854. His seminal work will alvvays be System of Transcendental Idealism; also very important are /deas for a Philosophy of Nature and Exposition of My System. At this point we need to let Schelling himself speak, and to do so we shall recall some of the passages from his Stuttgart Seminars, a cycle of lectures he delivered in 1810 fora group of friends.

Schelling: “To what extent is a system ever possible?” Answer: Long before man decided to create a system, there already existed one, that of the world. Hence, our proper task consists in discovering that system of the world. The true system can never be created but only uncovered as one that is already inherent in itself; that is, in the divine understanding. Most philosophical systems are merely the creations of their authors—more or less well thought out—comparable to our historical novels (e.g. Liebnizianism). To proclaim such a system as the only possible system is to be ex tremely restrictive, and results in a dogmatic system. | assure you that | do not intend to contribute to such thinking. At the same time, it is impossible to uncover the true system in its empirical totality, as it would require the knowledge of all, even the most discrete links. If the system that we wish to uncover shall indeed be the system of the cosmos: 1. it must intrinsically rest on a principle that supports itself, a princi ple that consists in and of itself, and that is reproduced in each part of the whole; 2. it must not subordinate or 3. furthermore, to ensure that

exclude anything (e.g. nature), nor must it unilaterally suppress anything; it requires a method of development and progression no essential link has been omitted”

Schelling's words express considerations that must not looked. It is indeed of absolute importance that Schelling speak of inventing a system, but only of discovering one. basic principle which says that the thinker in his research

be over does not The truly must not

exclude any element or clue stems from this; what this means,

in a

certain sense, is having a broadened understanding of the world. To delve more deeply into the concept, let's continue with our reading. Schelling: “What is the principle of my system? This principle has been expressed in a variety of ways: a. as a principle of absolute identity and unconditional identity, which among other things must be well distinguished from an absolute indifference. The identity that we refer to here is an organic unity of all things. Every organism possesses unity without, however, enabling us to 340

conceive of its parts as being one and the same. Thus, in the case of the human body all the differences between the organs and functions are dissolved into one indivisible life, whose sensation as an indivisible and harmonious one equals the sensation of well-being. Yet the parts and the functions that constitute this organic whole are not, therefore, the same: the stomach, for example, obviously does not have the function of the brain, etc.; b. this principle, then, found its more specific expression as the absolute identity of the real and the ideal. This is not to say that the real and the ideal are numerically or logically the same, but instead designate an essential unity. It is the same aspect that is posited in both forms, though it is proper in each of these forms and not one essence. Consciousness arises only with the separation of principles that existed implicitly in man beforehand, such as the rational and the irrational. Neither of the two is meant to be erased. It is precisely in this discord between the two, and in its eventual resolution, that our humanity must prove itself. If, then, we become conscious of ourselves—vwhen light and darkness begin to separate within ourselves—we do not properly transcend ourselves, the two principles remain with us as their unity. Nor are we deprived in any way of our essence but, instead, we attain ourselves in a twofold form, namely in unity and in separation. The same for God. If we posit A=A as the state of a self-rational being, we must already take note of three aspects of this formula: a) A as object, b) A as subject, c) the identity of the former two; yet all of this is understood as indistinguishable in a real sense. Meanwhile the difference of these principles is to be posited: that is, with A as subject and A as object being indistinguishable, A=A is converted into A=B; yet, because there nevertheless prevails the unity of essence the expression of difference is not: A A=A

The formula of the difference

A A=

B

that is, one and two; A=B is the bifurcation, whereas A designates the unity, and the whole expression designates the living, actual, and primordial being. A possesses an object, a mirror in A=B. Hence, the primordial being is in and of itself: The Unity of the opposition and of the Bifurcation ... Now let's examine this: if an A and B are being awakened in B itself so that consequentily: B = Nature following pages Joseph Beuys and Lucrezia De Domizio, in the garden of the hotel Océan Indien, Praslin, Seychelles, January 3, 1981

A=B this A, which is in Nature, does not enter into it, but it inheres in it from the outset ... As for the immediate relationship of my conception of nature with the physics and philosophy that reign in our day, the essential lies here: 341

that according to my conception there is no purely and simply objective nature, a nature that is mere being, that is, non-being. Thus, to sum up: I. The ideal and the real refer back to a unity, which can be expressed by the concept of /dentity. Identity in this case does not signify lack of difference, but rather unity of opposition and division. Opposition of the ideal and the real, like in an organism where the organs are different and carry out different functions, without this signifying that they are not resolved in a single indivisible life. Il. The formulas for differences are derived from these.

A = Man

B = Nature

A=

A=B

B

Both, in turn, stem from the Formula of Identity. A = Essence in itself (God) A=A

Clearly, in Schelling's ideal and real system, subject and object are not absolutely distinct in the sense of being terms that take it in turn to cancel each other out, so that only one of them can be considered essential. In fact, the ideal contains the real and the real contains the ideal. This is because already in the essence A=A we find A as the subject, A as the object, and their indivisible unity, that is, identity. Hence, it is understandable that when Beuys states: A new concept where true realism coincides with idealism and, vice versa, true ideal Ism coincides with realism, he is not talking about things that are very distant from the conceptual line followed by Schelling himself. And in order to valorize what has been presented it is perhaps best to pause once more on Beuys's Theory of Sculpture, which, as stated previously, constitutes his most systematic and definitive formulation. The theory is articulated according to two concepts: chaos (nature, the unconscious, will), and form (spirit. consciousness, intellect), as well as on the concept of Movement (soul, rhythm, sentiment), which allows for the procedural dynamic between the two poles. Beuys briefly recalls these concepts in light of a comparison with the new idealistic tendencies.

Beuys: /n substance, what the idealistic thinkers had to say was especially aimed at the idea of will bound to the idea of the Self but within the idea of the Self there also exists the concept of imagination, of insight. Essentially, they arbitrarily spoke of will and of the Self and did not also take into account the relationship with sentiment and thinking. Energy can be transformed into form, at the level of initial will, by way of movement, the transformation of emotion, of sentiment into an ultimate crystalline form, which would be the form of the Self: 344

will/sentiment/thinking or thinking/transport/movement, the three moments, Indeterminate energy/transport/movement. The third thought or form, thus by way of this process of movement from one pole to another, energy and form, constitutes a whole; hence, there is the union of the Dionysian moment and of the Apollinean one, so that matter ranges from a nebulous state to consciousness. This is how we arrive at an image of man that is not fragmentary. But the criticism aimed at the idealistic thinkers, justified in Fichte and Hegel's case, can in no way concern Schelling. What follows proves this beyond any doubt. Schelling's words are: “All living existence proceeds from a preconscious state in which everything still exists without separation, and which only subsequently develops in an individual manner; there does not yet exist any consciousness of division and distinction ... Within us there are two principles, an unconscious dark one and a conscious one. Regardless of whether we seek to cultivate ourselves with regard to cognition and science, in a moral sense, the process of self-creation always involves our raising to consciousness what exists in us in unconscious form, to turn our innate darkness into light, in short, to attain a state of clarity!' Schelling continues: “Yet philosophy is not demonstrative science: philosophy is, to use a single word, a Free Act of the Spirit. The first step is not knowing, but rather, expressly not-knowing, a renunciation of every knowledge made for man. For as long as man continues to want to know, that absolute subject becomes an object for him; it is precisely for this reason that man will not recognize it in himself. By saying ‘|, as myself, cannot know, don't want to know, thus divesting himself of knowledge, he creates a space for what knowledge is, i.e. for the absolute subject, which we have shown to indeed be knowledge ... Ve have tried to express this very particular relationship with the term /ntellectual insight. Insight, because it was believed that within insight or, better still, within contemplation, the subject is lost, even if it is placed outside itself. Intellectual, to express that the subject here has not been lost in the sensitive intuition, in a real object, but rather lost, abandoned to what inno way can be an object ... What man needs is not to place himself inside himself, but to place himself outside himself. It is precisely because of this entering into himself that man has lost what he was meant to be. If we think about it we can see that Beuys's concept and Schelling's are really not so far apart and for this purpose | would like to sum them up synoptically:

BEUYS

SCHELLING

CHAOS

een

>

FORM

Movement Creativity UNCONSCIOUS CONSCIOUSNESS Intellectual Intuition 345

All of this might appear to be an elucubration with no real relevance. But this is not true. This is proven by the fact that Beuys, with these

ideas, with this theory, laid out all of his work and, in the final analysis, all of his life, and Schelling, on his part, dedicated some of the most

beautiful and celebratory philosophical dissertations to the study of what to his eyes appeared to be one of the highest insightful forms afforded to man: Art. In his aesthetic doctrine, the German philosopher describes how in art the passage “from Life to Form” takes place effected by the objective side of “Intellectual insight" which is represented by “Aesthetic insight” Schelling tends towards the objectivization of this inner experience as it involves an understanding of the absolute as absolute formula. Hence, for the German philosopher it is essential to turn one's attention towards what, although presenting itself as finite, holds within itself the identity of the ideal and the real, and for this reason is to be considered an absolute form. Let's read from System of Transcendental ldealism:

“Art is atonce the only true and eternal organ and document of philosophy, which ever and again continues to speak to us of what philosophy cannot depict in external form, namely the unconscious element in acting and producing, and its original identity with the conscious. "Art is paramount to the philosopher, precisely because it opens to him, as it were, the holy of holies where burns in eternal and original unity, as if in a single flame, that which in nature and history is rent asunder, and in life and actions, no less than in thought, must forever fly apart” “.. An absolutely simple, identical principle cannot be conceived or communicated with a description, or, generally speaking, by way of concepts. lt can only be intuited” “For if aesthetic production proceeds from freedom, and if it is precisely for freedom that this opposition of conscious and unconscious activities is an absolute one, there is properly speaking but one absolute work of art, which may indeed exist in altogether different versions, yet is still only one, even though it should not yet exist in its most ultimate form” Of course, we haven't yet reached the Beuysian concept of broad-

ened art since, as we have already had a chance to certify, Schelling continues to possess a character of privilege afforded to art and not, for instance, to life and thinking. All the same it is very important for him to acknowledge the existence of an intuitive faculty that by starting off from freedom allows man to perceive the ideal that is present in the real, without having to resort to descriptions or concepts. But to my mind even more noteworthy is the fact that with Schelling we come to a vision of man and his relationship with reality that is decidedly and proudly unshackled from any sort of dogmatic or critical attitude. In other words, the question does not lie in the ideal or 346

the real, but in the ideal and the real, attributing a dyamic and organic function to this correlation, and not simply a logical one. This conception has disturbing repercussions on a practical level. In fact, by extending the two principles of the ideal and the real to their respective complex formulas of differentiation, we come to the following conclusion. Man and nature constitute an identity. To be more precise: acting in nature and in man are both principles that, in the being itself, are united in absolute identity. The consequence of this is that the whole world, i.e. everything making it up, from the most insignificant and simplest elements to the most complex and relevant ones, from man to the animal kingdom, from the plant world to man, cannot be differentiated on the basis of a qualitative criterion but only on the basis of a quantitative one. This is what we saw in the denominators for both formulas for the difference: A=B and A=B. Hence, Ideal=Real and ideal=real; i.e.: man=nature and man=nature. This formula signifies that in man, man is equal to nature and that in nature, man is equal to nature. The precedence assigned to the term “man” in these passages can be explained by the fact that if we keep to Schelling's thinking, a great deal of influence is still exerted by the ancient microcosmic conception, understood not so much in an anthropocentric key, as in an anthropological one instead. It is Schelling himself who explains this clearly: “Why is the absolutely ideal at present only and always found in man, while everywhere it is always set forth only and always potentially? The question must be answered by a specific field of science, anthropology, for which the concept has been set as follows. ... The absolute subjective only exists where the absolute objective is found, in other words, where the objective in its completeness, its totality, also exists. This only occurs in man, according to the ancient saying that the human body is the universe in a small microcosm." This does not mean that man is better than nature, but that expressed within man is a degree of completeness that can only be matched in the totality of the world, in the macrocosm. Schelling's observations in regard to anthropology are quite brilliant all the same, as he almost foresees what will be one of the keystones in Beuys's thinking, that is, the concept of anthropological art. Further more, Schelling gives us a precious indication when he writes “the absolutely subjective exists only where there's an absolutely objective ... only in man” We might wonder: does man, at present, possess the absolute subjective-objective? Does man really possess these two principles in their totality?

Beuys states that the purpose of his anthropological art is so that 347

people will know themselves. What we deduce from these thoughts is that, if it is true that the highest degree of absoluteness in man cannot be touched qualitatively, it is just as true that this deposit must always be reviewed through the form of superior knowledge, that is, through insight. Whoever fails in this in any case comes to self-limitation; and this, depending on the case, leads to a materialistic or a rationalistic attitude in relation to life: in both cases, reductive. Let's listen to Beuys's voice to this regard. Beuys: To me this all looks like the reduction of anthropos, of the idea of anthropos. It is the reduction of everything up to the point at which the body becomes a problem, both the individuals body and the body that is embodied by people. The truth of the matter is that they consider the body and speak of the body as though it contained a part of the spirit, but they can't even arrive at an statement, as in times past, when Plato observed that the human being is made up of a spirit, a soul and a body. As time went by, the tendency became that of considering the body as nothing other than an agglomerate of biological substances. Because every idea of the spirit was set aside and labeled as not being rational. But they still have to discover which dimensions the ancient philosophers, such as Plato, and ancient cultures, were referring to. It is without a doubt a good idea to avoid a sort of regression towards these ancient cultures, and at any rate to head towards new levels of consciousness. But we now also need to accept the consequences of all these reductions to a biological perspective of human life and to a materialization of human life, that is, to this ideology of the sciences and to this materialistic vision of the world. Hence, according to Beuys, today's man cannot discern the essential importance of succeeding in having an organic, real and spiritual vision in time of himself and of the world he lives in. But Beuys also speaks of the consequences of such a reductive condition. Let's ask ourselves: where are these consequences reflected? First of all, as we have seen, in man himself. And after that? Let's go back to Schelling for a moment. Within man, man is equal to nature and within nature, man is equal to nature. But how does man recognize the nature within himself and himself within nature, he himself having been the first to set the limits to his own intuitive capacities? Man eliminated the term “nature” first of all within himself: then in nature he eliminated the term “man Result: man is no longer equal to nature.

| believe that Beuys's Defence of Nature and all that can on the sur face be seen as Beuys's ecology should be interpreted from this viewpoint. To be truthful, Beuys attempts to once again open up a dialog with Nature, which is not really so different from reopening a dialog with 348

himself. Furthermore, the German Master's attempt is to allow nature to speak through itself. BEUYS'S VOICE. We cannot overlook this Beuysian concept. For this reason it is imperative that we stop to listen to Beuys's words in the conversation he had with the artist Marco Bagnoli on May 13, 1984 in Bolognano on the topic of the Defence of Nature. Marco Bagnoli: “So we believe that we have the consciousness of the tree. Perhaps the tree is actually the symbol of this consciousness. So | ask Beuys: but is this tree conscious of us? If it is, then it is the tree that plants us, materially speaking, absorbing our consciousness. If it isn't could it perhaps be the dead god that is reborn in our consciousness?" Joseph Beuys: Thank you very much Marco. What you've implied is something with which | completely agree. In planting trees, we plant the tree and the tree plants us, since we belong together. Its something that takes place by moving in two different directions at the same time. So the tree has awareness, or consciousness, of us just as we have awareness of the tree. It's therefore extremely important to try to create or stimulate an interest for these kinds of interdependencies. If we don't respect the authority, or the genius, or the intelligence of the tree, the tree has so much intelligence that it can decide to telephone a message about the sad state of human kind. The tree will give a call or two to the animals, to the mountains, to the clouds, to the rivers; it will decide to talk with the power of geology, and if humankind fails, nature will take terrible revenge, most terrible revenge, and this will be an expression of natures intelligence and an attempt to bring people back to clear reason by means of violence. If people have no other choice than to remain confined within their stupidity and to give no consideration to the intelligence of nature, and if they refuse to show any tendency to enter into cooperation with nature, then nature will turn to violence to force human beings to take a different course. We're at a point at which we have to make a decision. Either we do it, or we don't. If we don't we'll be faced with enormous catastrophes all over this planet. Cosmic intelligence will turn against humankind. But now, for a certain period of time, we still have the possibility of making a free decision and of deciding to take a course thats differ ent from the course we've travelled in the past. VVe can still decide to bring our own intelligence into line with the intelligence of nature.

following pages Joseph Beuys at Villa Durini, San Silvestro Colli, Pescara 1972

Apart from the nearly apocalyptic tone in the last part of Beuyss speech, which is actually quite rare in Beuys, what is truly essential is the idea itself of nature's own intelligence as a corresponding element that man had the duty to recognize and respect: it actually corresponds to human intelligence, it is human intelligence (in nature

man is equal to nature). Hence, clearly man's creative activity, his productive capacity at every 349

level, will never be able to override the fact that it has something homologous in nature.

While we work on nature, nature works on our soul. This is undoubtedly the profound meaning that runs throughout Beuys's work, especially so in operations like Coyote, How to Explain Paintings to a Dead Hare and, in particular, 7000 Oaks as well as the entire Defence of Nature operation. \e need to think about these words: Ve plant trees and trees plant US. If we look at things from this angle, then man's true task is to cultivate. Man is a gardener. A metaphor of this kind could only have been used by a poet. Indeed, inspired by an event that took place in Kassel, Antonio Porta wrote this poem in 1987, which he called The Struggle and the Victory of the Gardener against the Undertaker. Here are some of the lines from the poem:

Before the glass wall the charred mound, beams and ashes,

on this side of the wall the museum room tomb of its own self

but the peaceful gardener begins to plant the first of 7,000 oaks that have been planned right before the entrance door after having obstructed it with stones and trunks and soil and moss in remembrance of the king of shepherds, the lightning-struck deer, the faeces scattered on the lawn.

Love flashes in the air with a flaming arrow while the man with che grey felt hat shouts like a coyote, bellows grunts, and yet remains a man with a grey felt hat blue eyes and only a few months to live. A thousand sleds all ready with blankets, flashlights and one canteen each

to face the pack, empty, all to no avail for he who is transformed into sand and ash and fog.

“We need to pull the life out of the mounds of the dead

—too many of them— 352

but we sink our hands there

and pull them out.” In the bombarded church two windows and another blind wall around a fence are all thats left, a wooden cage to hide the wound, to reveal it, a cage from which to escape, without hatred

but difficulty overcoming the angst suddenly explodes once more as if the bomb had gone off

just one minute ago, miraculously someone is still alive with his hands on his ears he shouts to tell

the murdered passers-by. But it is he, the gardener, around the corner, together with the city other gardeners, with blows of the axe they tear down the cage, inside the empty church's fence they plant 7,000 caks plus five date palms for the young ones to play with. On the wall at the back

a panel made up of books held together by illegible cement bricks. Infinite small sleds back there, with a laughable team, ready to slide on the pack of the end,

but before they have to cross the present, lead the living inside a white hole,

with the help of the Red Cross. What are you doing, gardener? Have you given up? Are you afraid of the snow, the cold? Take one of the shovels from the trenches,

you know that if you dig a little under the snow it's not below zero, you know invisible material the uterus of every seed. The undertaker sits in the kitchen of the gardener's house, drinks his hot coffee, having left his tools outside the door, the freezing cold is doing its job, the gardener thinks that in a month 353

hell start to prune, like the undertaker. He knows the struggle is over,

victory determined, the undertaker is burying himself.

Beuys once said: /t's not true that the artist talks about himself only after he is dead. But perhaps a dead artist is better than a living one. Who can judge these words? I can and wish to say that we are all very lucky that Beuys spoke while he was still alive. We are lucky that he lived. If the opposite had been true, there would have been one less gar dener. But above all, there would have been one less man. We need men. And not just us. Nature needs men too. Didn't Hyacinth's friends miss him when he went off on his own to suffer in his solitude? Didn't the woods, the flowers, and all the animals cry for Hyacinth's bitter fate, the fact that he could no longer understand their happy voices? What is the secret? Perhaps Beuys discovered it. And perhaps he is not one with his Rose Petal. Then it would be true... perhaps a dead artist is better than a living one. “Love is the Great Secret" “Beuys's drawing includes the whole universe, especially the invisible one, and this is how the unifying connotations of his total commitment are understood” (Lucrezia De Domizio Durini)

Beuys. Drawing

In discussing Beuys's life we said that drawing was the first form of expression he used for the purpose of crystallizing the multiple and diversified experiences of his childhood. This happens to most children who, by drawing, give this personal form of expression a prevalently communicative slant. But almost all children at around the age of ten abandon drawing for writing. It is commonly known that at the beginning writing and drawing were the same thing; in fact, the Ancient Greeks used one word— grafein—to express both of these actions. Nowadays instead, when a child gets to be a certain age he is taught that if he learns how to write he will be able to carry out a learning activity, he will be able to decode reality, something that drawing would not allow him to do. In a similar perspective, it seems obvious that the drawing itself, the prodrome of any artistic leaning, is heavily underestimated in its importance and particularly in the role it plays in a child's education. 354

Thus, drawing is relegated to the world of art, becoming a discipline whose only goal is to execute an object to be admired in a substantially passive condition. It goes without saying that drawing, like any other artistic form, requires a good deal of natural talent and above all constant practice. It is also true that is the case for all those disciplines where a constant intellectual engagement and particular sensitivity is demanded of the individual. Thus, although it is logical and natural that not everyone draws, the belief that drawing is a specialized discipline, encompassed by reality, with the exclusive task of copying a model or satisfying the artist's subjective needs is not justified. Could it be that children's drawings are not assigned an absolutely objective meaning? Why does man continue to distinguish between what is logical and rational and what is spiritual and psychological? Isn't all this a living part of our daily perception of reality? For the child, writing and drawing are the same thing. Even more so for Beuys, for whom drawing, writing, speaking, operating have always been a whole, and | wish to remind the reader of the term “diamond” The whole universe is a part of Beuys's drawing, especially the invisble, and it is thus that we understand the unifying connotations of his total commitment. Between 1955 and 1957 Beuys went through a very deep crisis that forced him to take on a radically new stance both as a man and an artist. It should come as no surprise that precisely during those years he intensified his drawing activity, covering many of the themes and motifs that had characterized the story of his childhood.

Beuys: / believe that the most global events are always closely linked to what is usually defined as individual mythology. Because in those years it was not just global research leading to a theory that could be traced out like a pattern on a blackboard. These were also very productive years, with many concepts and with what would later be called the lineaments of a shamanic rite of initiation. Many of the drawings from that time were created with features that were radically different from the so-called “theoretical” frameworks of the social body. lt was starting from those years that sculptures, followed by objects and performances and actions of an intermediate nature, with sound or music, were created. These works were also part of the logical succession of concepts already present in the drawings. You might say that the themes and structures of the actions had practically already existed before in drawings. Dravings are, then, like a preparation for these actions. The actions invited people to discuss, as well as to debate politically late into the evening after the action had ended. But | needed the drawings for this. There is a very strong organic relationship between the early works from the 1940s and the crisis period when special themes appeared, followed by objects, actions and drawings for their display. 355

Drawings are thus a strong link that closely ties the different moments in Beuys's life into one organic entity: from childhood to the years when he once again became active after the war, from the crisis midway through the 1950s to the Fluxus period, from the great actions of the 1960s to the political fallout in the 1970s and from these to the Defence of Nature in the 1980s. For Beuys, drawing is energy, it is like fuel whose combustion is immediately resolved in his ideas becoming objects. Caroline Tisdall had this to say about Beuys's drawings: “For Beuys drawing has been a way of thinking, or a thinking form. Through it he established the three principles that run through all his work in all its forms, linking the earliest drawing to the later environments, the actions of the 1960s, the performances, and the current use of speech as a form of ‘invisible sculpture’ with which to communicate ideas: the widening principle the unifying principle the energizing principle The first two are linked and are both strategy principles in the face of the positivist Western materialism that has shaped both our thought patterns and our social structures. The widening of language is the key to the process of change in thinking, and for Beuys the widening of language came through drawing. Drawing becomes a way to reach areas unattainable through speech or abstract thinking alone: to suspend all notions of the limits or limitations of a field so that it encompasses everything. The germination point of all the later thinking appears in the drawings.

But what is the dominant feature in Beuys's drawings? The most important and most complete collection of his graphic output is the one owned by the Van der Grinten brothers, old friends of Beuys and the first to buy his work way back in 1951; the collection apparently includes more than 4,000 drawings as well as sculptures, correspondence and an assortment of documents. Franz Joseph van der Grinten's words in the early 1960s were: “Beuys's drawings are made directly and immediately. His drawings do not pass through a stage of harmonization that would make them pleasant to the eye trained only for beauty. Nor does he force himself to achieve a balance, a completeness or even to use the pictorial surface. The margins of the sheet, which are often described as irregular, mainly offer a frame in which the object or the person represented is situated in dissonant tension. At times the line goes beyond the margin, different sheets of paper are glued together and make up a single bearer of images, or the subject is involved in the assembly of images with both natural and artificial components in the same style or deliberately in another. He uses pencils of all sorts and colours, pens, and felt-tip markers, 356

Joseph Beuys,

Semina Montana project/drawing,

Bolognano1984

often with unusual coloured liquids that he himself makes, to trace the lines. The line itself is the noteworthy trace of an impulse that is often understood to be filled with thought, in search of form and movement at the same time ... The single line in Beuys's drawings twists and turns, it goes beyond, it suddenly veers, bends, widens in an irregular way, is interrupted, breaks in two, remains isolated in its tension and its spires, and is constantly being remodelled. Strong, dark, incisive points are just traversed by rays dispersed on the surface. Written notes—series of letters and numbers—are often so peremptory that they are hardly ever incorporated into the body of the drawing. Overall the work appears to be ugly rather than beautiful, but this must be understood in light of Beuys's particular vein and sensitivity.” Beginning in 1987 a selection of 200 drawings and watercolours made up the material for a successful series of exhibitions that travelled across Europe entitled “Beuys Before Beuys. The drawings had in fact been made between 1942 and 1964, that is, before the artist's international acclaim, and they all came from the van der Grinten collection. The following is taken from a text by Klaus Gallwitz which appears in the catalogue for the above-cited event: “When we look at Joseph Beuys's drawings we soon forget the sense of space we find our selves in, to enter deeper and deeper into that iImaginary place that attracts the gaze and the mind. It is like reading a book where, page after page, an inner evidence is formed that immediately appears in a context for which we were not prepared. The sculptor, according to Beuys's conception, draws and draws... our eye follows him from drawing to drawing and tries to find the way to discover how to read this sculpture. Some of the drawings remain closed, they are still impenetrable even after many readings. Fragile and simple lines do not lead to an energetic thickness or to explicative affirmation, but rather seem to transcribe a representation instead of expressing it. The intention lies within its very own trace; we still have not discovered where it leads and often you can't even see where it comes from. For Beuys's drawings a reading of the trace is a typical art which we are forced to refer to. On paper, these traces are strongly imbued with open writing. Vigorous, violent lines are set against fleeting, delicate lines and movements. Although Beuys prefers to use a pencil, he also uses coloured pencils, felt-tip markers, a fountain pen or a ballpoint pen. The arbitrariness of the techniques he uses and the combination provoke a particular character that contradicts the usual understanding of the drawing, but which is the only element that corresponds to Beuys's needs. As in many of his sculptures, he uses waxlike material, margarine, felt, gauze, glue, rope, aquatint as well as the media normally used for painting: oil, tempera, silver and gilt bronze. The different processes of fabrication and drying produce subtle and deliberate effects that shine in many nuances. 358

Beuys lets certain transformations due to the material and ones that are hard to predict act as they wish; they are for him the chance to continue to make new and unique works. Of course, there are some amazingly simple drawings, which communicate to the viewer from the moment he looks at them: they are like the comprehensible words of a difficult text. Image and reproduction, object and form, substance and material and speculative thoughts pass before our eyes like an unending current. Blurred contours and a difficult evaluation of perspectives constantly put our faculties of Judgment to the test. Beuys's drawings have the natural and disorienting force of an immense landscape. Beuys's drawings possess a certain intellectual, empirical and institutive certainty, they seem to set down the paths of a sort of maze that extends, opens and closes. They have a twofold nature, which on one hand creates disorder and on the other builds order; they are situated right in the inner relationship of tension in Beuys's work. A sensation that is constantly found in all the phases and with all the different media... Sketches with damaged, broken or perforated margins are typical in numerous drawings, but these are precisely the ones that are mounted again and at times developed beyond the borders. Pieces of paper and the remains of other earlier drawings are glued on top of them. The dirty portions are also integrated as are other traces; they are random manipulations during the process of execution. We follow hesitatingly or with repulsion the operations that are visibly carried out in a certain way and supernaturally, but also invisibly by a subterranean route.” There exists a series of drawings from another collection called K6/ner Mappe held at the Museum of Modern Art in Vienna since 1979. These drawings were made between 1945 and 1972. Dieter Ronte had this to say in the catalogue: “The so-called ‘Map of Cologne' at the Museum of Modern Art in Vienna is an excellent collection of Beuys's ideas, which honours and distinguishes his art. For Beuys, drawing is the ‘Medium’ most suited to representing his artistic intentions. In the 1964 works for K6/ner Mappe Beuys shows how drawing can transcend the descriptive and representative nature of drawing itself. The drawing is also a bearer of intuitions. The artist can, like an old god, examine the experiences of presence in a broadened reality. Beuys's drawings enter into age-old discussions because from the time of the Renaissance drawing was assigned an ideological nature, as it can supersede that of the image: the figure properly known as immediate or direct. Drawing becomes an intimate idea, a vision of the ideal product of the thinking artist, of the philosopher, the soothsayer: of what is seen. Because drawing alone, with the speed of light, makes it possible to fix the spontaneity of an ‘intimate vision' (Novalis). Beuys often uses this means because drawing, like no other form, allows for transitory signs. Akin to the independent act and not, therefore, the preamble of a perfect work, which would eliminate the former. 359

Beuys's drawing is not an expedient gesture but the ideal means of expression, and it corresponds to his permanent yearning for change. Drawing means fixing signs. Signs that manifest the clarification of creativity in the instant. The papers for K6/ner Mappe present drawings, watercolours and mixed media. They signify a spiritual attitude before reality. A filtering of natural experiences in images of plants, in the Romantic tradition, and of animals... Drawings, watercolours, collages, scores and oil paintings deal with independent sculptures. The drawing defines its primordial interest in morphology, in what nature looks like, in the organic and anatomical structures of flora and fauna. All this is widely demonstrated in KO/ner Mappe. The main theme is that of vulnerable, wounded men heading for death. They speak of archaic hunters, cultivators, voodoo beliefs; fragile and delicate figurines, fire, hearths, sacrificial banquets, stretches of gravestones, places for encampments, caverns, primi tive carriages and primordial sleds. The animals are carefully observed. Moose, wolves, hares, swans are graphically transcribed, in unison, along sunny shores and in the midst of mountain landscapes. Complex phenomena are evoked in mystical worlds. By way of symbols the world is interwoven, flanked by total experiences. Car parts, utensils, chemistry formulas, verbal communications in the shape of crosses, facts, conditions, descriptions of faith; emotions that are manifested, knocked down, precipitate dry, hard and intense like an accelerated psyche. The drawing is a seismographic trace, an affirmation of the anthropological relationships spread by primordial society; it manifests the areas of current filth, striking with the biology of the invincible forces of creation. Beuys's drawings point to Nietzsche, Apollo and Dionysus, in the endeavour to wholly understand the Universe. The drawing becomes a programmatic expression, a diagram of the reflected image of our distress. Fragments of faith, of legend. Fractures that obligate, involve in the humanitarian society of the Humboldtian ideal... In exemplary fashion, K6/ner Mappe embraces Beuys's graphic output. No theme that is important to Beuys has been left out. The viewer must undertake the attempt to interpret some of these drawings as pars pro toto! After these interesting readings, although we share all the analyses described, now | am interested in reading Beuys's drawing in a way that is closest to my direct experience with the German Master in the final years of his life. I begin my thoughts by referring to the words of Dieter Ronte: “The drawing is also a bearer of intuitions. The artist can, like an old god, examine the experiences of presence in a broadened reality” We know that intuition (from the Latin intuérì) is a term that was origi-

nally used by theologians to indicate God's vision or the mysteries of

the faith that can be enjoyed in heaven by the blessed and, by divine

grace, also by some of the men elected on this Earth, capable of un-

360

derstanding the truth of things as the immediate act of knowledge. It is worthwhile referring to intuitionism, a Doctrine that in relation to the nature of fundamental moral truths assumes two distinct ethical forms: the first is referred to as particularistic or non-philosophical intuitionism which states that an empirical knowledge of the facts is a moral duty; the second is called generalor philosophical intuitionism, and it states that our moral will, conceived as an aspect of the capacity to know certain truths beforehand, must fight scepticism with elements of self-evident knowledge. For Kant, instead, intuition is every knowledge that is immediately referred back to objects. He denies the existence of an intellectual intuition and distinguishes between empirical intuitions that hark back to objects by way of sensations, and pure ones, which are the form of empirical intuitions and respond to the notions of space and time. For the German philosopher, alongside pure beauty (pulchritudo vaga) is adherent beauty (adhaerens), i.e. beauty that also implies the end that the object must serve. And it is also known that for Kant the ultimate aim must be placed as a principle of the aesthetic faculty a priori. Beuys's drawing is undoubtedly a bearer of pure Kantian intuitions. Beuys who, as we know, by transcending childhood experiences because of his ability to think and draw beyond the present, like an “old God” who orients and directs thinking towards a future that he had conceptualized in his most intimate being, turns towards alternative futures that will depend on both his actions and the contingencies he cannot control. The drawing of the Shaman with the Felt Hat is a project of cosmic predestination. By drawing, Beuys begins to form systems and theories where he adapts his own perceptions and conceptions of reality, includes ideas, ideals, future actions, and all this serves to raise him up, while he draws, beyond the present time, pure Kantian intuition, of the needs, places and hedonistic desires. His Drawing is Project is motivated by ends that supersede the duration of his own life. Beuys's “drawing” is to be understood as a conceptualization of behaviour, as the freedom from old “felted”’ or staid, social systems. On the other hand, it is precisely the formal particularity that causes one to reflect on the atypical nature of Beuys's graphic drawing. The thoughts expressed by Caroline Tisdall, Franz Joseph van der Grinten, Klaus Gallwitz, Dieter Ronte and, lastly, Beuys's own voice prove such complex conceptuality. Having shared with him the last years of his life my thoughts go even further.

If we carefully observe the “list” of trees—prepared by Beuys on four simple sheets of letter paper—to be planted in his Paradise Plantation in Bolognano, we can see that these plants are typologically described in great detail, and that along with drawings of flowers, collages, pencil marks both light and dark, they give one the impres361

sion of going beyond the piece of paper. This took place in Palazzo Durini on May 12, 1984, on the day of Beuys's sixty-third birthday. We can safely say that more than forty years after he made his first drawings in 1942 Beuys used the same drawing method described in the readings above: subtle signs... paper collages... but an alchemical and practical je ne sais quoi differentiates them... the list that Beuys prepares with the help of a botanical encyclopaedia is very careful, accurate. The trees and shrubs described are plants in extinction to be planted for the future of those who feel the need to share a spiritual safeguarding, a creativity aimed at social improvement. So | wonder: isn't the list itself a Project, which, on one hand, is creative and artistic and on the other is a life project? Let's read what Beuys says in the Defence of Nature discussion that took place on May 13, 1984 in Bolognano: Beuys: / first made contact with a few people from this region some twelve years ago—primarily with Lucrezia De Domizio and Buby Durini—and the fact that they were already quite close to those kinds of thoughts, ideas, and ways of putting things into practice has led them into ever wider collaboration with the organization l've founded under the name of the Free International University. And now we're already at the point of actually entering the reality of doing the same thing in Bolognano that we have already done in Kassel with the seven thousand oaks. The plan that has brought me here to Bolognano and that bears the title "Defence of Nature” is more than just a slogan: it's a concrete plan for the planting of seven thousand different varieties of trees in Bolognano. In Kassel l've been dealing mostly with oaks, but here in Bolognano we'll be developing a kind of “paradise” where we'll have seven thousand trees of seven thousand different species. Its in the course of actually doing this work that everything else will become clearer. It's in the course of actually doing that we'll see the theory within and all of its implications ... Here, in Bolognano, the realization of the project will require a little more time than what been planned on for the planting of the seven thousand oaks in Kassel, and everything will depend upon the energy and enthusiasm of the people actually involved here in this region of the world, but lm sure it will allbe done ... the trees will be big and thick by the time | die. The youngest people now sitting here in this room will then be the people entrusted with taking care of them, and that's part of the consideration of the element of time, which is something very important in choosing to work with trees, and especially in choosing, as l've done in Germany, to work with oaks, which are beIngs that live for a very long time... Such a tree has a life that extends far beyond the life span of any human being, and this brings us quite immediately into contemplation of the element of time ... And Post-Beuys arises from these very words... By virtue of the needs which are the existential features of man as an individual and as the potential of creation-innovation of independent elements, 362

ones which

are biologically differentiated,

a reading

of Beuysian drawings thus sets itself as the development of new cognitive capacities of operations that aim towards the sublimation and expansion of thinking and of horizons. His sign cannot simply be understood as a graphic representation, but must dialectically be accepted beyond the moment in which it was generated, determined by an evolutionary process, as an integral part of a structure of creative and purpose-driven communication that is coherent with a specific contemporary historical-cultural situation. But let's think about how, where and why Joseph Beuys's drawings begin. We know that when Beuys came back from the war he was going through a period of deep depression. His suffering began in 1954. In those years, Beuys was found in a friend's apartment hiding in the corner of a room, in the dark, with bruises on his legs, and saying over and over again that he wanted to die. This is why he had a wooden house built for himself, a dark and isolated space where he could lie down: he wanted to cease living. Thereafter, he would often say that those were difficult years... He was saved and taken in by the Van der Grinten family, who were his friends and collectors, and who owned a farm in Kranenburg. It was there that Beuys began to work the land as a form of therapy, and it was this closeness to the land that helped him to regain both his physical and spiritual health. Beuys: Everything | held inside had to be eradicated: a physical change had to take place for me. Diseases are almost always spir itual crises in life, where past experiences and phases of contemplation are put aside so that positive changes can take place (this

was previously discussed in the Third Station).

following pages Joseph Beuys compiling the list of the trees to be planted in his Paradise Plantation. Bolognano, Palazzo Durini, July 12, 1984

lt was in this period while he was working the land and drawing men, animals and plants that he overcame his physical and mental malaise and arrived at the spiritual renewal that he himself discusses. It is his faith in the existence of very close ties between changes in the body and in the soul, a specific soul-body conception. Beuys's experience tells us that each one of us potentially possesses a fulerum of energy that is distinctly qualified with the features of identity and singularity, which tends to further qualify itself as spir ituality in the sign of universality. As a person Beuys possesses himself, perfects himself in his self-possession, he expresses himself to himself and to others, he does not create the world but in his drawings he shapes it, recognizing it and recognizing himself as being present at its infinite transcendence. Nonetheless, he is totally besieged in a physical, physiological, social, historical, metaphysical reality by which he is influenced as regards his being and selfexpression. It is obvious that in his drawings of men, animals and plants the entire process of development starts from a reawakening, new horizons open up and he begins to see the world through a new 363

Boi Ste Ur, ggDa teo OR

eldo

db

Nel

dn ,

Gi

logi Lil

{

ti

PSE

-_\

E nik

"i

Val

san) fc

c-

Pa

4

eat lla Ca Ln; AG leon,

A

SEZ a alain fio

Li

pes,

7) tal

GW

[GF

fraSI

ln 49

,

f

Vr:CU 549) fra lies

o

da

AEap credi

(

Di nea)

l

pidirne/

/ DI] “lago

1;

Aun

br

Si

Nago «in

2

Vi

j

\ Î

Y

a

pa

oo

ILS

C

n

PTNA.

le,

A

a. led

/

de

id

a

V

ATI

AV

[e

=

,

) té ) /

e

CULETTO

îa;

a

dI ‘ SII 4

LA SY

@

uu?

__NA.Loo#3 VI. < {Ar

Le

same of vefTgAgiagi "a SU. darf ua Lat | Ì Ci bol ar “ f [Dergsf,/

ai

Mio,

È)

“aa

c lana

Var

UTO

VE 1.676

19)

ta

“

L

Ala

17,5,

fine

(np

a]

SEO

n

Vea

SETE

}a

2A TRI(00

=

;

MAIA)

(

vDEr

a)

È z

a

>

9 "a

1A

di 7

VEE gd

È

Waenio

v } aa

')

il cia Ya

}

C

A

K

SPA

n

po

(Aa

def

LE)

LAB

PM Aa

Lev

Si

Ano VÀ

a

TE Ces},

fai

NI

RESGO

gu

E Tia

i

ù,

‘A

ly

190 did DE)a

aa

Ù cla

Piega, Pie 1/00 f 3 pala IDEE Mica Lac ei

IRhop

/

q piro 5

2

N

la;di

Nato

Ò

È

rai

n

at

SRI

Ual

Nese

Spa.

TR

cca

I "ea

T+

co

Fia

a

Di DE, a

da

fd

der

2A

Zora

uu

Cell 27)

dp

3" U

La

67

\ MAI

d

cs

f

Liu

AL

>

viso

=

"sro “A

TW

U

pe |ein

N

Sa 75 Peg

fg 71 2)

7

‘

D

immane?

vr lido|

o

Meina

| Miek

ei

Alvin

I

ang o)

fi: - 7;

Pd 1,

319! d)

|

larry 1 , &

Ra

(EVE

|

I

I

v

Vi

= L'ON

AA

=

/

Aaa

A]

I

_dd TVOTAREÙ1eli iLÈ y dg] Wo

les

e I

FA

i

S

[ n 51, i

LCoe

®

o

. 2)

concept of art with the anthropological idea of human creativity at its centre. Clearly, artistic expression exists as a form that character

izes operative freedom. It is a sort of freedom that cannot be considered and evaluated a priori as it is reality itself that imposes itself as a constitutive and conditioning, qualifying and essential element of concrete existence, open to the evolution of the real where the

real is put forth as a continuous individual creation. Beuys perceives a sick world, the same world we are experiencing and are aware of today. On the other hand, as we previously observed in the Fourth Station, the relationship between Nature and Art is present throughout German Romanticism from Goethe to Steiner, from Novalis to Schelling, but Beuys, by overcoming all Romantic nostalgia by way of his shamanic intuition and by working in time, arrives at the last period of his life through the various Stations, where he accomplishes his most noble art: his Defence of Nature operation. Hence, art is no longer limited to the artistic context; rather, it is a daily act, a creative commitment at the service of humanity. This is the Beuysian concept spread to Art. We need to say that in addition to gestures and actions with which, through intuition, he meant to develop energy, Beuys also used other “means” to make his concept of art known. One of these was to autograph every object given to him (hats, shirts, paper napkins, etc.). If ve dwell on his signature-souvenir, often accompanied by a small drawing of his hat, we can't help but notice that this, in addition to the underlying motivation as expansion of his thinking, possesses a suggestive pattern that accentuates the meaning of a communicative project that excludes it as a formal element. Emphasis must be placed on the fact that in cases such as these the use of a pencil rather than a red pen (very rare) or a black one, took on particular Meaning. Indeed within this context, of particular interest is the substantial distinction, in terms of artisticleconomic value, between the signature placed on a souvenir and the one placed on a work of art which, because it is such, is properly catalogued in specific publications. To this regard | wish to recall the famous drawing for the “Operation Helicopte-Mountain-Sowing” project dated May 13, 1984 where Beuys emblematically illustrated the fabrication on the part of volunteers and students of small packages made out of gauze containing clay and seeds. The drawing shows a helicopter, the two mountains in the Abruzzi region, and the spherical elements of the word “Clay” A reflection on the element of Steiner's theories of agriculture that mediates the action between the earth and the universe by promoting an upwardly ascent. The peaks of two mountains in the Abruzzi region are connected by an umbilical cord to a helicopter cabin. By way of that “cord” the sowing proceeds from above to below in a probable growth, while the seeds were to grow from bottom to top. It is a configuration that joins the universe to the terrestrial, sky and earth... Beuys from his helicopter sowed the mountains, 366

impervious zones... Unfortunately because of his premature death the project was never objectively completed, while the message of man's daily sowing...

One reflection for all. Beuys began his career by drawing men, animals and plants, working in the fields of the Barons van der Grinten in Kranenburg. Beuys ended his life working the land for the good of the people who live on this Earth, and this takes place on the property owned by the Baron Buby Durini in Bolognano. In Italy Beuys's Concrete Utopia is realized in the Utopia of the Earth. The Earth, the Common Home where all men inhabit and live. We might all believe that Beuys left us prematurely at the beginning of the new year on January 23, 1986; but | believe that nothing is random. Beuys taught us that instead of perceiving pain like the strongest thorns of life, we must translate suffering into the capacity for the renewal of a new life. Right before he left on his journey of no return, Beuys had set up a human drawing, giving us living human beings the chance to draw the peaks of a great landscape of universal love. At this point we are close to a clear understanding of the design for life that Joseph Beuys for the fruitful good of Humanity aimed at the Safeguarding of Nature and in Defence of Man. One does not remember something, that something remembered is constantly being built with the help of others. (Lucrezia De Domizio Durini)

Drawing by Joseph Beuys for Olivestone, Dusseldorf 1984

367

Fifth Station

Beuys and the Post-Beuys

at Bolognano in Defence ofNature

Note | would like to begin this complex Station—one of the most difficult for me, as it me-

ans casting light on the Defence of Nature operation that took place in Bolognano—by handing the word over to the college graduate Ilaria Apostoli, who wrote an interesting senior thesis. This will be followed by the contributions of people who have embraced Beuysian thinking. The reader will be able to better understand the spirit that pervades the whole publication.

Bolognano the town of Culture in Nature Aldo Roda

Beuys Voice

Joseph Beuys at San Silvestro Colli, Pescara 1973

Poems in the shape of a fluid leaf trace pathways new spiritual thoughts present in the streets of Bolognano: Harald Szeemann street. Defence of Nature a greater human respite idea-fulerum-message seal signs affective schemes true perceptions shaped by the morning breeze. Hypogean Figures as light as rarefied air places-memories expressions of elegant gestures music-performances-meetings enliven the supersensitive essence of the concept. A project donated to each Man displays in Shop Windows (dark spaces flooded with light) Stable Signals-Forums, different languages. The planting of Oaks elements of life, essences witness the transcendent and immanent meaning of Nature. Distances of feeling the beauty of the rose in inner reflections. Paradise Plantation the idea of the perpetual renewal of events. One path leads to the torrent below where everything flows. Piazza Beuys other gravitations take part in the discovery of meaning expanded. Theatres of Nature's scenery without falsehood the first-born shaping of works of Time held still in Space. 371

— My encounters with the people who live in this part ofthe world, in this small

town ofBolognano—and I am referring to Lucrezia De Domizio and Buby Durini—go back a dozen

years, and the fact itself that these people are close to my way ofthinking, to my ideas and practices has always drawn them to a broader

collaboration (Joseph Beuys)

Bolognano (Pescara)

Bolognano: An Artistic Utopia (From Ilaria Apostoli's dissertation)

“Taking its lead from Joseph Beuys, a town becomes a workshop of art and culture”

1. Introduction

This study aims to investigate the very atypical cultural programme initiated at a small town in the heart of Abruzzo. Here, a small bor go set in the highlands of the Maiella has applied the teachings of Joseph Beuys to become a workshop of art and culture. A focus of artistic activity since the end of the 1970s, the place has become a very unique type of museum/gallery, and the aim of this discussion is to analyze the premises for the creation—and subsequent development—of such a project. Bolognano's relationship with the work of the enigmatic German artist Joseph Beuys began when it hosted his Studio, and then his last great Operazione in difesa della Natura (Operation in Defence of Nature). Due to the friendship established with a pair of collectors—the couple Lucrezia De Domizio and Buby Durini—Beuys would adopt Bolognano as a fixed point of anchorage for his entire poetic endeavour. After the untimely death of the artist, Lucrezia

De Domizio,

who

years earlier had embraced the philosophy behind Beuys's art, decided that steps should be taken to promote the survival of the Master's thought and ideas. Fully aware of the social, cultural and anthropological import of his art, she undertook the immense task of promoting his entire oeuvre at both a national and international level. This involved not only publication of texts and the organization of conferences, events and exhibitions, but also the transformation of Bolognano into a place that could be said to crystallize the German artists poetics. However, what arose in this small town was not some sort of sanctuary erected to commemorate “the artist shaman.!" Eschewing the immobility that is often associated with such places of memory, Bolognano is a place of manifest vitality; it has become a great workshop for intercommunication between the arts, with “Beuysian vir tues" providing the basic criteria for each initiative and project. The first part of this study analyzes the premises for the collaboration between the lead figures in the project Difesa della Natura, while the second part looks at the metamorphosis that Bolognano has undergone: after a description of the cultural and historical characteristics of the place, there is an account of the initiatives and projects which over the years have changed its appearance. In effect, thanks to the work of Lucrezia De Domizio and support 374

following pages Homage to Joseph Beuys at the entrance to Bolognano

from various illustrious cultural figures of international renown, this almost forgotten town tucked away in the mountains has become an oasis of creativity, where the production of art and culture exists in harmonious conjunction with acts of tribute to the great German artist. Alongside a description of the significant “signals” raised in commemoration, this study also focuses attention upon the project entitled Oltre i Musei; in Difesa dell'Arte (Beyond Museums; in Defence of Art), which involves the entire urban space of Bolognano and aims to establish a new way of approaching and “using” art. In effect, art is no longer envisaged as residing exclusively within a predetermined space or physical location; instead, it becomes an integral part of Nature and the surrounding environment. Within Bolognano, expressions of art and culture are made freely available to the spectator. The result is a very atypical museum “layout;’ extending through streets, across stretches of landscape and within sites that are characterized by their association with the arts (for example, the splendid house-museum known as La Casa di Lucrezia). And in this description of the entire scheme, particular attention is focused upon a project of cultural and environmental redevelopment entitled Vetrine Notturne (Night Windows). This latter involved restoring various long-abandoned local buildings and houses and then using them as the setting for works by a number of artists from Italy and abroad. As a result, crumbling buildings that were destined to disappear have come back to life, with a new function as exhibition spaces. Such installations have given a new appearance to the small town, making their own contribution to this very special and atypical “museum. All of the initiatives listed above exemplify the principles at the very basis of the conception of art which inspired Lucrezia De Domizio. The first of these principles is a striving towards a multi-disciplinary art. This was an idea that was urged by Beuys himself and then masterfully pursued by De Domizio, becoming a manifest feature of the installations that have occupied the town. The second principle regards the need for cultural intercommunication between humankind, which is indispensable if society is to be improved. Finally there is the principle that provides the key to this entire project: the need to overthrow the present-day “system of art” and the financialleconomic mechanisms which make it possible. It is these principles that are exemplified in the works installed within the town (each by artists of different backgrounds and working methods). It is they which reveal the presence of an overall cultural project behind the entire scheme. The third part of this study analyzes Lucrezia De Domizio's ambitious project // Luogo della Natura. Servizi e magazzini della Piantagione Paradise (The Place of Nature. Facilities and Storerooms of the Paradise Plantation). This involved the creation of a sort of hypogeum beneath Beuys's studio, its very location seeming to stress the paternity of the entire scheme. A space that can be used for conferences, meetings, concerts and performances—as well as 375

being a study centre with a sizeable archive of documents—this hypogeum serves every two years to host the Free International Forum, an event which brings together European figures important in a number of different cultural disciplines. (The aim is to nurture active collaboration and a free exchange of experiences, with all the participants striving to improve themselves and thence society as a whole.) 2.A Human Partnership: Joseph Beuys and Lucrezia De Domizio It is important here to understand the premises which led to the important cultural project of Bolognano. For more than forty years Lucrezia De Domizio has been an active figure in the world of culture both in Italy and beyond, striving to promote the poetics of the artist she has taken as her Master. Thus the basis of everything discussed here was the profound relationship established between artist and patron, which can best be understood by looking at the two characters involved. Who was Joseph Beuys? Many have tried to give an answer to that question, sometimes erroneously pigeonholing the man as an exponent of Conceptual Art or of Arte Povera, sometimes so overemphasizing symbolic readings of his work that he appears to be some sort of esoteric preacher. However, while aspects of all the above might be condensed within his art, its essence lies elsewhere and cannot be identified with some pre-established poetics. For years now critical discussion of the German artist's work has been char acterized by a striving for the /ectio difficilior, with the result that his art has not figured in the usual art textbooks or has been relegated to the far boundaries of Arte Povera (with Beuys being classified as an “ecological artist"). Given this, one must here identify all the key phases in his artistic

career. 3. Lucrezia De Domizio. A Life at the Service of Culture

Endowed with great artistic sensibilitv—and human feeling—Lucrezia De Domizio has dedicated her whole life to the promotion of cultural endeavour. During the course of her career, she has been a journalist, a writer, an art critic, a collector, a curator and a patron, promoting innumerable projects and initiatives that range from the world of art to that of humanitarian aid. Born in 1986 into a family of art collectors in Trento, she would grow up in a cultured and stimulating environment. Having married Baron Giuseppe Durini of Bolognano, she would from the early 1960s give expression to her great love of art through her first great project: the opening of Studio L.D., a contemporary art gallery. Here, in Pescara, she would hold exhibitions of work by Alviani, Burri, Fontana, Rotella, Pistoletto and Spalletti, as well as collective shows illustrating International Constructivism, American Pop Art and so on.

In the 1970s her villa at San Silvestro Colli in Pescara would become a 378

meeting place for all the leading figures in art at that specific historical juncture. Innumerable artists would be guests at the Durini home, a place of cultural engagement and creativity: naming just a few, one might cite Vincenzo Agnetti, Marco Bagnoli, Alighiero Boetti, Pierpaolo Calzolari, Sandro Chia, Giuseppe Chiari, Francesco Clemente, Gino De Dominicis, Luciano Fabro, Enrico Job, Jannis Kounellis, Eliseo Matti-

acci, Mario and Marisa Merz, Luigi Ontani, Giulio Paolini, Vettor Pisani, Prini, Vitantonio Russo, Remo Salvadori, Ettore Spalletti and Renzo Tieri. And Lucrezia De Domizio would collaborate not only with these artists of the Arte Povera and Italian Conceptualism movements, but also with important figures from other cultural disciplines. Further more, she would also be active in the field of international art criticism. During this period she set up a space for art events within the stables of the old Bourbon fort at Pescara—a further contribution to the for mation of an avant-garde environment that became well-known both in Italy and abroad. Thus when Lucrezia De Domizio first met Joseph Beuys in 1971, she was a well-established figure who had developed her own artistic insight. And the very sensibility and intuition which, a few years earlier, had led her to promote various young artists who have since become international names, would also lead her to appreciate the unique universal qualities of Joseph Beuys's art. Even though she was used to meeting artists who pursued their own individual course of artistic research, De Domizio was in some way overwhelmed by her encounter with Beuys and his ideas. Realizing that active collaboration between various creative disciplines was the way art could give highest expression to its striving for the ideal, Lucrezia De Domizio began to explore new directions, aiming to break free of the pre-established mechanisms of art in order to arrive at something that was freer, more phenomenological. And thus she developed her own ideal of artistic creation, with the creative act being envisaged as something totally free and untrammelled by traditional artistic methodologies; something that strove towards horizons which lay beyond the mere search for an individual poetics. Beuys, she saw, looked towards—and looked at—society, ideology and the very problems of existence. Profoundly sympathetic to this entire philosophy, she decided to follow him, promoting his art and ideas throughout the world. The first Italian scholar and historian of his work, she is today one of the world's greatest experts on the art of Joseph Beuys. 1974 would see the discussion event entitled /ncontro con Beuys (Meeting with Beuys); held in Pescara, this was the first act in what would be a very fruitful collaboration. Then would come Venice, Kassel, Naples, Paris, London, Dusseldorf, Seychelles, New York, Edin-

burgh, Munich and so on, with De Domizio following Beuys and his art, and her husband, Buby Durini, capturing each event in magical photographs. However, it was Bolognano that would see the most significant projects of the last great challenge undertaken by Beuys. The frame of reference for the Defence of Nature was the countryside of Abruzzo itself, with Bolognano becoming the artist's second home. And for this entire project, the collaboration of Lucrezia and 379

w her husband Buby Durini was of fundamental importance. Domizio De projects, these of The prime organizer and financial backer was assisted in her difficult task by eminent figures from the world of contemporary art—for example, Harald Szeemann, Pierre Restany, Thomas Messer and Felix Baumann. Thus she managed to set up a fixed point of reference for Beuys in Italy. And when the artist died at his Dusseldorf home in 1986, De Domizio took up a new challenge,

directing all her energies into the promotion of his thought and ideas throughout the world. As President of the Italian “Free International University” since the 1980s, she has used not only exhibitions within major international museums, but also group discussions, debates, conferences, publications, written publications and even graduation theses to achieve this end. Of the innumerable exhibitions she has curated, one might list amongst the more recent: Operacio Difesa della Natura (Barcelona Museum of Contemporary Art), Joseph Beuys. L’Immagine dell'Umanità (MART, Rovereto), // Bosco Sacro di Beuys (Gibellina), Buby Durini for Joseph Beuys (Musei Civici Er emitani, Padua; with the planting of an oak tree near the Scrovegni Chapel), Giardino di Beuys (Coast Brava) and Joseph Beuys. Diary of the Seychelles (Fondacio Caixa, Gerona). The most recent exhibition she curated was opened in Milan in May 2009. These are just some of the projects she organized, amongst which one would also have to include international events, exhibitions dedicated to individual contemporary artists, and musical and theatrical events. As a theatrical director, she has worked at the Teatro Gobetti (Turin) and the Teatro Quirino (Rome), as well as devising such a-typical stage performances as The Thought Take Shape and The Felt Hat. Joseph Beuys, A Life Told —all for Aldo Roda at the Teatro Out-Off (Milan) and the Teatro Scandicci (Florence). With Giorgio Gaslini, she put on // Bosco di Beuys at the Parma Jazz Festival. Lucrezia De Domizio is the author of fifty-six books, twenty-six of them dedicated to the ideas of Joseph Beuys. Here, one might mention // Cappello di Feltro, Olivestone, L'immagine dell'Umanità and La Spiritualità di Joseph Beuys. Amongst the most recent are: Pierre Restany. L'Eco del Futuro, Harald Szeemann. Il Pensatore Selvaggio, Il Luogo Della Natura. Servizi e Magazzini della Piantagione Paradise, Vitantonio Russo Economic/Art and, with Giorgio Gaslini, Lo Sciamano del Jazz. In 1993 De Domizio was made a member of the Order of Arts and Literature by Jack Lang in Paris, and she is also a member of the Tribunale dellAmbiente. In 2001 the Italian President, Ciampi, awarded her the Ordine AI Merito della Repubblica Italiana. She has also received the Targa Argento per Committenza (Silver Trophy for Art Patronage) from the State Archive and the Culture Merit Award from the City of Sarajevo, where she curated the Italian Section of the Museum of Contemporary Art. In 1990 she set up the non profit-making Clavicembalo," in homage to Joseph Beuys.

cultural association

“Il

For twenty-one years she lived in a loft apartment in Milan, making this again a space of study and discussion for artists and intellectuals. 380

It was from here that she produced the magazine RISK Arte Oggi, Periodico di intercomunicazione culturale, which she founded and which still flourishes. In the past she has edited the series Charta/Risk for Edizioni Charta (Milan) and the series // Clavicembalo and | linguaggi della Cultura for the publishers Silvana. During the course of her intense life in the arts, she has donated important works to numerous international museums—for example, Joseph Beuys's imposing Olivestone, now in the Zurich Kunsthaus, of whose Board she is an Honorary Member. As will be clear, Lucrezia De Domizio has a wide range of interests, vhich means that during the course of her life she has become involved in a variety of projects, not restricting herself to a single field of action. Indeed, this multi-disciplinary character of her work is the thread running through her entire professional life since 1971, the year in which she first met Beuys. Hence, alongside her work at an international level to promote Beuys's ideas, she also threw herself into this very unusual project. Within the old town centre of Bolognano, she initiated a scheme of both environmental and cultural redevelopment that involved the transformation of the town as a whole. Arising initially as a tribute to Joseph Beuys, this scheme has over time become a highly-articulated project that eschews the conventional museum approach: Beyond Museums; in Defence of Art—that truly is the common denominator of all the projects De Domizio has undertaken in Abruzzo. Since March 2007 she has lived and worked in Bolognano, where—in the hypogeum of the Paradise Plantation—she organizes the biennial Free International Forum, an interdisciplinary event that attracts important cultural figures from all over the world. Amongst her more recent projects, one might mention the event Joseph Beuys, Difesa della Natura, which De Domizio curated at the 52nd Venice Biennale, and The Living Sculpture Kassel 1977 Venezia 2007 - Omaggio ad Har ald Szeemann - 100 Giorni di Conferenza Permanente. Inspired by the idea of returning to the exact themes that Joseph Beuys had covered in his work at Documenta IV, this latter event aimed to underline the need for the discussion of such universal issues to remain a vital part of artistic discourse. For the 53rd Venice Biennale, De Domizio would also curate the project /s /t possible? Nature and Economy Together. In investigating this problem of great contemporary relevance, she drew upon the collaboration of two artists who have been part of her professional life for the past thirty years: Marco Bagnoli and Vitantonio Russo.

4. Joseph and Lucrezia. Defending Nature and Safeguarding Humankind From 1971 to the year in which Beuys died the Durinis played a role in numerous of his artistic projects. The relationship between these three people did not come about by accident. Fascinated by the reputation that surrounded the Ger man artist, it was Lucrezia De Domizio who got in touch with him 381

directly. This was made possible by the gallery-owner Lucio Amelia, who invited the couple of collectors to his gallery in Naples, where Beuys was opening a one-man show. The exhibition was a great critical and public success, and also provided the occasion for the much desired “encounter.' Buby Durini was a biologist,

a man well-versed in both the sciences

and in literature, as well as being a landowner who had always been fascinated by the world of agriculture. Joseph Beuys was immediately attracted by the baron's personality, the range of interests that they had in common generating a “feeling” between the two men. In effect, the friendship that resulted now seems almost inevitable; and, as a photographer of great visual sensibility, Buby Durini would become the first photo-reporter of Beuys's projects. Alongside the scientific sensibility of her husband was the complementary artistic culture of Lucrezia De Domizio. And these two qualities bound together in a single husband-and-wife team meant that the two became a single great support for Joseph Beuys's work: whilst Lucrezia organized discussions and exhibitions, Buby contributed his expertise as a photographer and his experience in the sciences. In 1973 the artist was invited to the Durini estate and immediately fell in love with the surrounding countryside. This marked the beginning of the friendship and collaboration behind the promotion of the artists work. Incontro con Beuys was the event which, on October 3, 1974, marked the opening of Lucrezia De Domizio's new exhibition space in Pescara. On that occasion there was an open discussion on the theme of direct democracy and creative freedom, the participants including the critic Filiberto Menna, the writer Caroline Tisdall and numerous artists. Beuys engaged in dialogue with all those present, and also created the work Cairn and two slate blackboards. In 1976 Beuys was the Durinis' guest on their estate at San Silvestro ai Colli, where he created the work Biological Plowing. At the same time he created two other works: VVho Says Rabbits don't like Joseph Beuys? and The Function of Art and the Need for Free Teaching. In 1978 Beuys was in Pescara for the presentation of the FI.U“Free International University” in Italy, and this would be the occasion for the famous discussion on a Fondazione per la Rinascita dellAgricultura (Foundation for the Rebirth of Agriculture). Organized by Lucrezia De Domizio, this debate brought together all the figures in both Arte Povera and Italian Conceptualism. But as well as artists and eminent international critics, there were also representatives of other disciplines, such as economics and philosophy. Of these, Vitantonio Russo was the artist-economist whose ideas on these themes Beuys most appreciated, with the encounter giving rise to a debate of the economic problems posed by any attempt to establish a new form of social economics that would lead to a real improvement in society itself. Distributed and discussed that day, the small booklet Terza Via - iniziativa promozionale - Idea e tentativo pratico per realizzare una alternativa ai sistemi sociali esistenti nell'Occidente e in Oriente (The Third Way — a promotional initiative — an idea and practical suggestion for an alternative to the social 382

systems that now exist in East and West) was the first concrete attempt to develop Beuys's theory in this direction; the copyright for the Italian version belongs to Lucrezia De Domizio, who would later issue the booklet in other languages. In 1980 the husband-and-wife collectors decided to re-open the 16th-century Palazzo Durini, which had been closed-up for fifty years. This was the first sign of the forthcoming transformation of Bolognano, which from that time onwards would become the focus of a number of projects and initiatives. In 1978 Beuys had created the /stituto per la Rinascita dell'Agricultura in Pescara; now, in 1980, he would continue this work in Bolognano, with Difesa della Natura. This project involved an entire farm of some fifteen hectares, made available to the artist by Buby Durini; the old farmhouse was restored to be the artist's Studio. After being prepared through the use of natural fertilizers, the ground was planted with the first samples of the 7000 shrubs and trees that Beuys had included in his famous “list” of plants threatened with extinction—thus giving rise to what would become the renowned Paradise Plantation. On occasion of his sixty-third birthday, in May 1984, the artist would present Lucrezia De Domizio's entire collection of his works within Palazzo Durini, creating the showcase Meeting with Beuys 19791984; the Durini would subsequently donate this work to the Guggenheim Museum in NewYork, where in 1979 they had collaborated directly on the large retrospective dedicated to the German artist. Everything that took place at Palazzo Durini on that occasion occurred under the watchful eye of a film camera. And the following day Beuys was presented with the keys to the town and made an honorary citizen of Bolognano—so, in a certain sense, became an Italian citizen. On the same, now famous, day of May 13, 1984, the artist would also plant the First /talian Oak in the Paradise Plantation opposite his Studio; he would also open the discussion on The Defence of Nature—a notion which inspired the ambitious project in Abruzzo and other aspects of the artist's work. The whole day is recorded in the book /ncontro con Beuys, in whose publication Beuys himself was involved directly. But alongside the projects in Abruzzo, one should also mention the various initiatives throughout the world in which Lucrezia De Domizio and her husband were involved with Beuys, offering support and also photographing the key moments of his famous interventions. All of this gives one a clear idea of the level of collaboration that had been established between the figures discussed in this study. However, there is one further point that must be taken into consideration— a point which makes it possible to read the Bolognano projects in a different light. In effect, the collaboration between artists, critics and patrons can often give rise to profound friendships, which means that the relationship involved is not simply predicated upon work. \Vhat was it that led Lucrezia De Domizio to elect Beuys as her Master? When one loves the work of an artist so profoundly that one elects him as a sort of existential guide, something has happened that goes beyond the realm of art. In effect, Beuys's work is as illuminating as it is 383

attractive. There is no doubt that he was a charismatic and fascinating man, who could promote his art by his own physical presence; each gesture, each movement—his very clothes themselves—everything

was imbued with symbolic significance. To fully understand Beuys as physical being, as a presence, one might perhaps quote from what Massimo Donà says in the book Joseph Beuys La Vera Mimesi, edited in collaboration with Lucrezia De Domizio Durini: "..Beuys lives as an artist; he makes his life into a work of art. He presents himself as an exemplary agent of that art—whose proclamations of truth, of prophetic messages, can be listened to, and hopefully concurred with, only insofar as they are the pronouncements of an artist; only insofar as his ‘saying’ is a manifestation of absolute, perfect liberty... Beuys lives as a prophet; but he can demand real attention only insofar as his prophesying is that of an artist. This is no secondary matter: only insofar as they are pronounced by an artist do his words become credible. For he is the only one who is the glaring proof that a certain type of life is actually possible. And this is the only reason why he can be truly understood and believed; it is for this alone that his words become full of significance, that they are the object of serious reflection. It is solely because they took place within what is unmistakably the context of art that his actions are still‘ emembered—to the point that for many people they have become models to be studied with the greatest attention. What he proposes is another type of respect for life ... And he achieves this by adopting a sort of uniform: a felt hat and a fisherman's waistcoat... which highlight the exemplary nature of his own indefatigable action upon the world”

Beuys was no soapbox orator; he talked about life because for him art must be life; he believed that the “means of art” are established by channelling the individual creativity of each person—and thence of society as a whole. Hence, the intention of his art was to set in action the artistic nature of all human action. And it was these intentions to which Lucrezia De Domizio responded. Understanding that the “Beuysian utopia” might be transformed into the Utopia of the Eartht—that it can, in part, be brought into being—she undertook to follow in the path that the artist had traced. She thence sought out collaborators who were willing to bring to the cause the individual characteristics with which life had endowed them; each contributing his/her own creativity, these collaborators generated an enormous network of human and cultural relations. Drawing upon the concept underlying Beuys's Living Sculpture, Lucrezia De Domizio established real-—and human—intercommunication, based upon the concepts emphasized by the German artist. And her skilful exploitation of these relations enabled her to undertake the arduous task of laying the basis of a Post-Beuys, so masterfully described by Szeemann and Restany. Given this, the projects implemented at Bolognano take on further meaning. Quite apart from their significance for art itself or for the very notion of “the museum," they are the fruit of a clear intention 384

to make the place itself into what Beuys described as an “art vehicle"— symbol of that total art which is fully integrated with life itself. In effect, these are “fixed signs” on a path which was first marked out by Beuys. They are set in place to delimit the locus within which the Beuysian utopia has taken on life. An admonition to present-day society, they express (and generate) the hope that “The Royal Art of Joseph Beuys” might continue to put forth shoots, with Lucrezia De Domizio working to nurture the dissemination of Joseph Beuys's universal concepts.

5. Bolognano: Beyond Museums; in Defence of Art On the southern slope of the Pescara valley, Bolognano is a small town in the very heart of Abruzzo, within the protected oasis of the Maiella Natural Park. Measuring a total of seventeen Joseph Beuys in front of his Studio in the Paradise Plantation at Bolognano, 1984

square kilometres, the

three individual setttements that make up the Bolognano Local Author ity Area have a total population of just over one thousand, and the town enjoys the wonderful natural setting of the Orta Nature Reserve. 385

The place has a very ancient history: archaeological finds in the Piccioni Grotto—now a popular tourist attraction—prove that this place was already settled in pre-historical times. However, though those first settlements date back thousands of years, the first definite records begin around the year 1000, during the time of the Saracen invasions. Here, as in many areas of Abruzzo, the members

of

various religious orders were obliged to build fortified citadels for themselves in order to enjoy some protection against looting and depredation. The Chronicon Casauriense tells us that Bolonianum was fortified in 943 by Clementine monks, who had received the territory in donation from Ludovico Il two centuries earlier. With the passing of time, the population gradually began to build their own homes close to these fortified structures in order to enjoy some degree of protection, thus the typical hilltop towns came into being. In Bolognano itself one can still see evidence of this phase of development in the two archways that were initially part of gateways intended to keep out marauders. The monks maintained control over the town for centuries, but then in 1273 the area became part of Abruzzo Citra (a province of the Kingdom of Naples). An ancient fiefdom of the barons of Durini, in the 17th century it would be considered part of the province of Chieti, then in 1927 be incorporated within the newly-established Province of Pescara. Like all the towns of Abruzzo, Bolognano would experience substantial emigration during the post-war period, with a sizeable drop in its population. It was only in the 1980s that it once again became a showcase for events that attracted attention from outside. Thus the arrival of Joseph Beuys's art in this town marked an important episode in its history. One can see this, for example, in the words pronounced by the head of the local Cultural Affairs Department, Claudio Sarmiento, on May 13, 1984, when the artist was made an honorary citizen of Bolognano: “.. In this small town of the Pescara hinterland, even a small event that breaks the usual routine can attract special attention. But today, faced with an event that is far from small and has nothing to do with the usual routine, our reaction is one that goes far beyond special attention. For that reaction is a tangible expression of the honour one feels in being able to meet Prof. Joseph Beuys, to whom we extend our warmest welcome. Having amongst us Joseph Beuys, an artist of worldwide fame, is a source of great pride ...” That event would mark the beginning of the transformation of Bolognano into a key point of reference for the international art world. Nowadays the population of the borgo itself is said to be as low as 300, the result of the gradual abandonment that has afflicted so many of these small hilltop settlements in Abruzzo. However, unlike all other such borghi, here there is the firm hope that, nestled within its wonderful natural setting, this splendid town—fortunately spared the dramatic effects of the Abruzzo earthquake in April 2010—can enjoy a new leash of life. 386

Bolognano, with Mario Bottinelli Montandon's Casacielo - Scultura Abitabile

6. In Honour of Joseph Beuys At the entrance to the town there is a rotunda that contains a work by Renzo Tieri with a large 30-meter hoarding which reads Difesa della Natura. Joseph Beuys. Alongside the famous slogan are the eyecatching Quattro Punti Cardinali inscribed on a large concrete plaque that is mounted upon the wall. Tieri is an artist who worked for years with Beuys on the Paradise Plantation and he devised this work in 2001, with the four emblematic symbols representing the cross, the Greek rt, Einstein's famous equation and the symbol of infinity. The four expressions of an existential course indicated by the German artist, these are the cardinal points of his own vision—and they are placed here at the entrance to the town to indicate how the very essence of the German artist is lovingly preserved here. Leading off the central street of shops and houses is a narrow alleyway that immediately attracts one's attention. Between two walls a narrow sloping passageway leads up to a short flight of steps. This provides the frame for a large felt hat, beneath which one can make out the intense gaze of Joseph Beuys himself. An imposing welcome, this huge photographic enlargement was raised to celebrate what would have been the German artist's eightieth birthday; an initiative promoted by Pierre Restany, it is just one more expression of the place's dedication to Beuys's work. Passing further down the main street, one encounters a sign to Piazza Beuys. Approached via the town's dense network of narrow streets, this was officially opened on May 13, 1999 by Harald Szeemann; the German critic himself, vho died in 2005, has a street named after him here, where a plaqgue commemorates his long-standing collaboration with Baronessa De Domizio. A key figure in the Defence of Nature project—and in the Post-Beuys period at Bolognano in general—Szeemann made a significant contribution to making the events organized at this small Abruzzo town known at an international level. Indeed, his work as both an independent critic and a very a-typical curator is held in such high esteem here that the hypogeum constructed within the Paradise Plantation is named after him and his family. Moving up the few steps of Strada Szeemann one finds oneself immersed in the very special atmosphere of Piazza Beuys. Planned some fifteen years after the discussion which initiated Difesa della Natura, this is located behind Palazzo Durini and is considered the first permanent expression of the Post-Beuys period at Bolognano. Indeed, the entire piazza—which occupies what used to be the site of a public waste-dump—was designed on the basis of the criteria that inspired Beuys's own art. lt has a small amphitheatre that looks out over the world of nature and four beds planted with the trees and shrubs which the artist himself elected as “virtuous symbols”: rosemary, a symbol of the energy of the universe; laurel, which since ancient times has been used to crown men of greatness and here expresses the greatness of culture itself; olive, a spiritual symbol of productive peace; and oak, which often figures in the work of the artist and here—as a symbol of the existential course that 388

Beuysian man must follovw—evokes notions of longevity, strength and stability. To the sides of the back wall of Palazzo Durini, small niches have been created to house a bottle of FI.U.wine and a bottle of FI.U.olive oil— symbols of the work that the artist initiated at Bolognano. The “nerve center” of the projects which spread throughout the town, this piazza is a unique phenomenon within the world of contemporary art. As, from the center of the piazza, one looks towards the Pescara valley, one sees on one's right La Casa Della Critica. Then, slightly concealed by that building, is the bright blue of Mario Bottinelli Montandon's Casacielo, a work that irresistibly attracts the eye. It is this surprising piazza that serves as the starting-point for one's journey through the narrow streets of Bolognano, past the various Vetrine notturne (Night Windows) distributed throughout the entire town. 7. La casa di lucrezia

following pages Some pictures of la casa di lucrezia, Palazzo Durini, Bolognano

An expression of the feudal power once exercised here by the barons who gave it its name, Palazzo Durini was re-opened in 1980 after having stood unused for almost half a century; it subsequently became the central point of reference for all the projects being pursued in Bolognano. During Beuys's lifetime it hosted discussions and planning sessions, being the nerve centre for all the various projects that were undertaken here. The decision to give it a new function—to transform it into /a casa di lucrezia—was taken by the baronessa after the tragic death of her husband. Modifying the layout of the interiors, De Domizio turned this into a splendid home-museum that today houses an important collection. It is here that Lucrezia still lives, surrounded by works of art; the rare pieces of furniture are designed by Giovanni Bruni. Everyday objects and art installations interact, reflecting the idea that art and life form a single whole. Overlooking a small piazza in the center of the town, the 16th-century palazzo comprises forty-two rooms on five different levels—a sort of labyrinth. Each wall of the old structure has been painted white, to provide a better setting for the installations; whilst each room now houses both works of art and evidence of the life lived here by the owner. As one passes through the various rooms, one encounters some of the works that Lucrezia and Buby Durini put together from the 1970s onwards. Here, there are the first Conceptualist works by Gino De Dominicis, Francesco Clemente and Sandro Chia, as well as pieces by Remo Salvadori; there are also rooms dedicated entirely to the economist-artist Vitantonio Russo, to Marco Bagnoli and to Ingeborg Lùcher—all artists who still play an active part in the redevelopment of the town. Various works are by young artists who enjoy the support of the baronessa. Furthermore, this house-museum contains the most important private collection of work by Joseph Beuys; it reflects the interweave which existed between the lives of the Durini and the projects cre389

EEREE BERE

£

HH < N N O [= n) ea

Z

ated by the artist. Beuys is a palpably physical presence from the very entrance hall, where a huge photographic enlargement shows him in his typical topcoat looking out over the mountains of Abruzzo. Alongside this image—which strikes one as the contrary of Ve are the Revolution—is a photographic portrait of the owners of the building, seeming to welcome the visitor. The entrance also contains images of the two highly significant critics Harald Szeemann and Pierre Restany, with whom Lucrezia worked in close collaboration and thence established a profound friendship. Another room on the ground floor contains the famous cardboard boxes that make up the work Vino FIU, whilst alongside is Lucrezia's studio, where she works each day. lt contains two large works on emulsified canvas, which figured in the famous Beuys retrospective at the Guggenheim in New York and were for a number of years on loan to the Zurich Kunsthaus. As one passes from one room to another within the palazzo, one gets some idea of the life lived by the figures who are the object of this study, with Buby Durini's insightful photographs splendidly documenting the entire period. And throughout the interior are works by Beuys, contained within specially-created display cases in natural wood. These include, for example: the whole of the Diary of Seychelles; the press and decanting vats for FI.U.oil; the coloured Ombrello which Beuys intended as an act of homage to the artists exhibiting at the Museo di Rivoli (a photograph on the wall shows him during that 1984 exhibition, strolling under the large umbrella that was a symbol of the protection and tutelage provided by culture). There is also the work which was left unfinished at the artist's untimely death: Harrowing Machine for Hunger in the World. Filling an entire room, this comprises a series of sieves of various sizes that are operated manually to separate corn and chaff. In effect, it is an embodiment of the entire philosophy underlying Beuys's art. These are just some of the numerous works by the German artist to be seen here, accompanied by ample documentation comprising drawings, video, photographs, postcards and posters—all the various means that Beuys's used to convey his social message. Even the typical domestic spaces within this home-museum take on symbolic significance. One example is the kitchen; the very epitome of shared social existence, this contains at its centre a large white table, ready to receive the numerous guests who are to be integrated within the massive work of social art envisaged by Joseph Beuys. Indeed, a text entitled The Art of Cooking contains various images that show the artist cooking in this very room; enlargements of some of these hang on the walls. Pervaded by a sense of lived experience, /a casa di lucrezia is also a place where things exude a sense of symbolic significance—from the choice of works and artists exhibited to the almost obsessive physical presence of Beuys himself in every room. The space is invaded by photographs, which afford a glimpse into that which underlies the creation of this locus of art: the desire to establish a place of unfailing effort towards the realization of a Beuysian utopia.

However, the layout is simple and straightforward, eschewing any attempt to force the visitor to follow any predetermined course. This makes it possible to digest and metabolize impressions—to under take a journey of discovery outside preconceived ideas and notions. And this freedom is further enhanced by the fact that this is a private house, so the number of visitors is low. Indeed, anyone who is fortunate enough to visit /a casa di lucrezia is already motivated by specific intent, by what he/she already knows about the place. However, while the fact that it is outside the usual tourist circuits means that the very nature of this a-typical cultural institution is preserved, it also means that knowledge regarding it is restricted. Alongside the main entrance to /a casa di lucrezia is the small church of Santa Maria Entroterra, an integral part of Palazzo Durini itself. What is most striking here is the church door; produced by the artist Stefano Soddu, this massive work in bronze contains various symbols that reflect the path to be followed by the Christian. Forming a distinct feature of the palazzo courtyard, this does not however evoke the notion of enclosure or limitation; a gesture of invitation into the consecrated space beyond, it is unmistakably an entrance, a threshold to be crossed. 8. Vetrine Notturne

A mechanism of mental engineering; a novel that both replaces— and stimulates—man's imaginative capacities. This is a sort of waking dream, made possible by love and the unfailing collaboration between men. (LDD)

following pages Vetrine Notturne,

Bolognano 1980-2009

These comments by Lucrezia De Domizio—which cast light upon the intent behind all the projects undertaken at Bolognano—here serve as the introduction to perhaps the most striking of these. A part of the Beyond Museums; in Defence of Art project, the scheme of cultural and environmental redevelopment entitled Vetrine Notturne was launched in 2001. It was inspired by Lucrezia De Domizio's realization that the numerous abandoned premises in Bolognano could be instilled with new life. Various houses and premises in the streets of the small town centre were first made fit for use, with panes of shock-proof glass being installed to create display windows (vetrine) that would be illuminated at the same time as the street lights came on. Then the search began for the artists who might create permanent installations within those spaces—artists for whom collaboration with this project would mark a significant step in the development of their poetics. An analysis of the name chosen for this project gives one an insight into the deeper intention behind it. For the installations were meant to catch the eye in exactly the same way as do the shop windows in any city street—with the difference that here the aim was not to get the passerby to spend more but to invest time in observation. The aim was to stimulate knowledge and reflection not consumer acquisitiveness. This alternative method of presenting a work of art leaves the spec-

Udi

King Flsche

THE VIRST

THE FIRST FREE

INTERNATIONAL

FREE FORUM

INTERNATIONAL 2009

FORUM

2003

"THIRD FREE INTERNATI VETRINA NO'

/ITANTONIO

RUSSO

Scripta volant nm FIRST INTERNATIONAL 2009

FORUM

SuosiaLara DeCome Cini

REMO SALVADORI 1980

a dg

tati

het

WILLIAM AN ONEGALLO INDUSTRIAL HIGHGLOSS FREE

THE SECO INTERNATIO!

BRADSHAW ROCK, 1999/2006 IE SECOND IRNATION

FORUM

2006

ia De Domizio Durini

MARCO Se

introduci

THE

FREE

BAGNOLI

lo Spazio

non

entri

nella

st

anz

FIRST

INTERNATIONAI 2003

FOR

UM

tator an extreme degree of freedom. There is a powerful sense of displacement: as one wanders through this silent town, one is presented with art that has been subtracted from the usual financial mechanisms of the world of consumerism. The challenge posed here was accepted by artists who came from different backgrounds, who use various different means of expression. Leaving within Abruzzo an indelible mark of their own artistic development, they have chosen to put their work at the service of society as a whole. And over time the number of such installations within the streets of the town has gone on increasing. The first showcase/house that one encounters upon entering the town contains a work entitled Mi Disegno; In Cammino (I draw myself: On the move). The result of the collaboration of two artists— Omar Galliani and his wife, Laura Intilia—this is an interior that offers an insight into various aspects of Galliani's artistic vision, with drawing being the constant feature. In this almost surreal environment, a dialogue is established between drawings of human figures, symbols and traces of colour, with the installations created by the two artists occupying the white walls of the structure. The entire work is rich in symbolism, very a-typical living environments serving to bring together artistic experimentation and the objects and spaces of everyday life. This showcase, in effect, aims to be a welcoming environment in which to enjoy hospitality and share experiences. Slightly further on from this showcase, one finds Radio Rock by the American artist Dove Bradshaw, which uses the sound of distant radio messages. At the Second Free International Forum, this was presented along with the showcase by her husband William Anastasi: One Gallon Industrial High Gloss Enamel, Poured 1999/2006, a development upon the famous work that is part of the permanent collection of the Metropolitan Museum in New York. Passing beyond La Casa di Lucrezia, one comes to Marco Bagnoli's Se introduci lo Spazio non entri nella stanza (If you introduce Space, you can't get into the room). Installed in Piazza Beuys, this seems to commemorate the discussion that took place on May 13, 1984 between the young artist and Beuys himself. The central theme of the installation is one that is fundamental to Bagnoli's artistic explorations: the relationship between art, science and spirituality. It is particularly atmospheric at night; almost as if its famous Red Band were releasing the fire of cosmic love throughout the entire town. In the late 1970s Bagnoli vvas among the co-founders of the magazine Spazio x Tempo, the title marking a combination that would become a common denominator of all his work. Space and Time are two factors that are essential to the unfolding of the act of art; and the union of those two words—SpazlIO E TEmpo—also contains the combination

IO ETE (Me and You), which is emblematic of the relation of the human being/artist to society itself. The colour red is almost always to be found in Bagnoli's work, expressing the desire to communicate both empirical and spiritual energy. Advances in technology have a decisive effect upon Bagnoli's vvork, with collaboration between art and science being seen as particularly fruitful. As Bagnoli himself says:

“The work of art is always a miracle, because it occurs within the world and for the world ... It occurs within what was a vacuum, and thus in its excess makes an offering of itself. The artist does not create; he limits himself to understanding that which is already there. But he does not do this in the same way as the scientist does. If art is the manifestation of being, science does not know how things stand; it acts at a general level. The gaze of science reflects Nature, as a subject posited in relation to an object... These key notions are also exemplified in the Bolognano installations. Both the vetrina, whose reddish/purple light irradiates one side of Piazza Beuys, and the memorable Dharma of Enel, a permanent feature of the Paradise Plantation, are imbued with a powerful sense of poetry, reflecting the genius loci of the borgo itself. Ingeborg Lùscher, an important Swiss artist and wife of the critic and curator Harald Szeemann, here produced the showcase King Fish, with a large yellow fish floating within the narrow space of the black-coloured window. The effect is magical and surreal, generating a sense of displacement. The colour of sulphur—symbolizing the “magnetic world” of the artist—appears constantly in Lùscher's work as an embodiment of positive energy. And in King Fish she leaves a mark of her passage through Bolognano in the form of a stimulus to creation, an expression of art as activity. Just like the Bandiera Gialla (Yellow Flag) in the Paradise Plantation—a permanent installation of a large flag—this work is the expression of hope for a future of splendour and prosperity. One could also see a parallel to that particular project in the Evento Beuys that took place at the 52nd Venice Biennale, when—vw/ithin the Spazio Thetis—another yellow flag was raised to mark the link between the two institutions, and also to express hope for the future. Moving further on through the streets of Bolognano, one comes to K2, an installation by the local-born artist Renzo Tierì, who collaborated with Beuys on a number of projects, including Aratura Biologica (Biological Plowing), Piantagione Paradise and Olivestone. The anthropological discourse underlying all of Tieri's work is comparable to the poetics that inspired Beuys's art. Taking nature as the prime source of inspiration, an attempt is made to reawaken a desire for social improvement within humankind, the bearer of the energy necessary for any renewal of society. Representative of Tieri's poetics, K2 brings together within the showcase all the materials that are typical of the sculptor's work: stone, glass and burnt oil. Stone represents being; glass represents the everyday life of the world, serving as a metaphor for the insidious threat posed by an industrialized society that penetrates and pollutes all pure thought. The large stone stele with the inscription “K2" could be seen as marking the finishing-point of a course of existential development. It is placed at the back of the installation surrounded by myriad pieces of glass laid out on the floor. When illuminated, these become a source of artistic vitality within the installation. Le pietre luminose (Luminous Stones) is another installation byTieri; together with Philip Corner's La Sala del Silenzio e del Suono (The

Room of Silence and Sound), it was inaugurated during the Third Free International Forum. AII of the installations chosen for Vetrine Notturne are inspired by the same basic poetics; each one focuses upon universal existential problems, upon the issues of humankind in the world and humankind in by Vitantonio Russo, society. This is clearly exemplified in Scripta Volant who teaches Economics at Bari University (with a special focus upon the economics of the cultural heritage) and in the 1960s was the founder of Economic Art. The aim of this economist-artist is to establish a link between two disciplines that are apparently very distinct from each other; influenced by his own teaching activities, he attempts to bring the language of economics within the realm of art. These experiments would, in 1976, lead to Russo's foundation of the very a-typical Nonopiano. Centro Studi di Arte Comparata e Ricerche Interdisciplinari in Bari. He would also take part in discussion groups with Beuys on issues regarding economics, agriculture and the environment. And in this Bolognano installation, he again proposes the concept of art as interdisciplinary. Scripta volant can, in fact, be taken as expressing both a concept and an admonition. Lined with mirrors, the window space has at its centre articles and pages cut from international economics journals and newspapers, the whole bathed in blue neon light. There is a button one can press to active an air pump, which for ten seconds whirls the loose cuttings around in a vortex. Further reflected in the mirror surfaces that enclose them, these fragments of news become impossible to perceive as such; indeed, the ten-second limit of the air pump reflects what is said to be the average attention span dedicated to any news item (only after the cuttings fall to the ground again can one attempt to read them). A warning against the disastrous distortions implicit in the mass media, the work not only highlights a clear crisis in present-day systems of communication but also reflects upon a system of information which is more concerned with audience ratings than professional ethics. Within the Luogo della Natura there is also another installation by Russo: Mònadi, which is located alongside the avenue that leads the visitor to the entrance of the hypogeum. Another artist who collaborated frequently with Lucrezia De Domizio in the 1970s was Remo Salvadori. Along with the above-mentioned works within Palazzo Durini itself, he also made his mark upon this town with his installation // Modello. Clearly identifiable by its massive reddish orange door, this work is unlike the others described above in that it seems to be set within the bare stone walls of the old house which contains it. The FI.U.vetrina was unveiled in May 2008, during the Third Free International Forum, and it is dedicated to all the delegates of the Free International University, which was founded by Beuys in 1974 and is still active (headquarters in Amsterdam). All the FI.U.delegates (over

forty of them) collaborated on the creation of this installation, which contains pieces from various famous Beuys projects and is intended as a hymn of praise to art as multi-disciplinary and multi-cultural. Entitled Conference Room, its various component installations chart the course of the FI.U.since the 19705. 398

The purposes and intentions behind the Vetrine Notturne have, over the years, led to the creation of various other “dedicated” environments— such has La Casa della Musica and La Casa della Critica.This establishment of spaces dedicated to specific disciplines is a further manifestation of the desire to create a veritable oasis of culture which affords both inspiration and space for creative endeavour. The Casa dellArte is the most recent such foundation. Opened on July 3, 2010, during the Fourth Free International Forum, this is intended as a tribute to the Zari family, and in particular Lucrezia De Domizio's godson, Federico Zari. But Lucrezia De Domizio's bonds with the Zaris go beyond family ties; they are interwoven with the relations that they all established with Beuys and numerous other artists—many of whom created works specifically for this house, which is sparingly furnished with a few design pieces. Working together with twenty-seven artists, Lucrezia De Domizio has transformed the Casa dell'Arte from a ruin into a place that is a veritable metaphor of culture as collaboration and cosmic love. For the Fourth International Forum, all the public benches in Bolognano were painted red—a spiritual exercise in which Marco Bagnoli evoked the memory of Venice, Sparta, Gerona and all the other “Beuys Gar dens” that are to be found in cities in Italy and throughout Europe. 9. Casacielo

Within the whole Bolognano project particular attention should be focused on the work of Mario Bottinelli Montandon. Opened in May 2001 by Pierre Restany as part of the event La Spiritualità di Joseph Beuys organized by Lucrezia De Domizio, Casacielo was the first of Many similar projects—for example, in Sparta and at the Spazio Thetis in Venice. In some ways, it is an itinerant work, its celestial blue carrying a message of art and culture to various cities in the world. VVithin Bolognano, the installation takes on particular significance. The artist's first venture of this kind was his // Lavatoio Celeste (Celestial Vash House) which was installed within the Paradise Plantation in 1994. This marked the beginning of a deep series of reflections which would result in the inhabitable sculpture of Casacielo (Home Heaven). Montandon, in effect, restructured a house located not far from Piazza Beuys, covering each surface in sky blue and modifying the internal layout to create a very unusual house in which each living space coincides with an individual artistic installation. The first question one should address here is the choice of colour. Blue, which figures in a number of Montadon's works, is linked with “divine, celestial vision! Deliberately “displaced” within this medieval town, the construction thus coloured attracts the attention of any visitor; it becomes a goal to be reached, a heavenly sanctuary that draws the sensitive spectator forward on his path. In a moving essay dedicated to the work, the great Pierre Restany would write: “.. The work which Montadon has fitted into this setting is like a gemstone that seduces the eye; it almost seems to suggest the presence of a treasure chest containing who knows what hidden 399

treasure. Casacielo is an invitation to humankind to ponder the mystery of the self, the possibility of different ways of being, of manifesting one's presence in the world ... The whole of Casacielo is nothing other than the symbolic representation of humanity in a domestic key; this is humanity presented as capable of mental sublimation, of greater adaptability to the conditions of existence ...”

These few words are enough to give one some idea of the profound exploration of ideas that underlies this great social/artistic project. A photographer as well as artist, Bottinelli Montandon has a training in the humanities that is in some way comparable to that of Beuys himself. Just like him, he returns to re-read the great Romantic philosophers, to study the works of the very founders of aesthetics and philosophy, to analyze religious texts. And, just like the German artist, he found his own artistic direction only after passing through a period of existential crisis. His poetics have always revealed close attention to moral and transcendental issues, and Casacielo might be taken as marking the point of arrival of a specific course of existential development. lt conveys a message of cosmic import, inciting humankind to strive for the right balance between the needs of the everyday and the needs of spirituality (which present-day society has tended to sideline). Within an interior where every wall is sky blue, there are two floors: bathroom and kitchen-studio on the ground floor, and a bedroom above. Each everyday object here has a dual domestic and symbolic function—a duality which reflects the doubling of living and existing. In an intermediate space within the building is the Autoanimale, a sculpture that emits sounds and highlights the very a-typical nature of this domestic interior.

Mario Bottinelli Montandon, Casacielo - Scultura Abitabile,

Bolognano 2002

400

On the facade on the building, where the stables once stood, the artist has created his own vetrina, which goes together with the others distributed around the town. Entitled Mistic Corporis, this shows a human body reduced to its limit extremities: two arms and two feet moulded in red concrete from rubber gloves and boots are suspended by thin wires, invisible against the whitewashed concrete walls surrounding the piece. Offering a possible vision of both microcosm and macrocosm, Casacielo is for the small town of Bolognano what that town itself aims to be for the world: a point of reference, a place that serves to bring together art and human values, preserving them against the arid world of non-culture that permeates society and hinders its perception of such experiences.

10. The Greatest Challenge. Il Luogo della Natura. The Service Facilities and Storerooms of the Paradise Plantation

A few kilometres outside towvn—on the road which leads from Bolognano to Madonna del Monte—one comes to Joseph Beuys's famous Piantagione Paradise. Here, twenty years after the death of the artist, Lucrezia De Domizio undertook her most ambitious project: the hypogeum. The initial idea for this centre for discussion and interdisciplinary activities can be traced back to a drawing by Beuys which is dated April 12, 1984. Thus, quite unconsciously, the German artist laid the basis for an architectural project which is still unique in the world—both for the structure itself and for the concept behind it. The starting-point was the felt need to create somewhere that would complement the function of the Plantation, serving both to house the projects promoted by Lucrezia De Domizio and as an expression of the Post-Beuys development of Bolognano. This private space stands within the valley plantation that symbolizes the possible regeneration of the entire planet; it is designed as a sort of underground grotto, irradiating the surrounding world with the energy of culture. The famous studio that stands above the structure is a clear allusion to the paternity of the entire scheme. In the hypogeum, technical problems and conceptual issues went hand-in-hand; in effect, the structure responds to the need to give concrete and tangible expression to a concept. If the Paradise Plantation might be described as place that reflects Beuys, the “Service Facili ties and Storerooms of the Paradise Plantation” reflect Lucrezia De Domizio; they are her space. This structure was her greatest challenge. She threw herself, physically and financially, into the project, determined to overcome all obstacles to the realization of her dream. And first and foremost amongst those difficulties was the technical issue of the building work itself. It was no simple task to find the right personnel for the creation of an underground structure twelve metres below ground level—that is, within a solid wall of rock. Under the guidance of the designer—architect Giovanni Cieri——vwork began in 2003 on a study of the morphology 401

and geology of the site. The factors considered concerned not only those raised by the experimental architectural nature of the scheme, but also such issues as: end function, cost, environmental impact, weather conditions, and all the other questions necessarily involved in such an unusual and complicated project. However, thanks to the cooperation of technical experts, geologists, engineers and a skilled team of builders, the idea came to life. The end result is a structure that is entirely underground; covered by grass, the entire volume is invisible from outside as one approaches the entrance to the studio building. The choice of building materials also had a symbolic import: entirely in reinforced concrete, the result is a “spare and unadorned space" inspired by the “ethical choice of an interior shorn of any sort of indulgence in form for form's sake. The intention was to be as close as possible to the very crust of the Earth—the most uncontaminated thing that exists—and search out within the roots of the Earth itself a support for cultural development. Here one might quote what De Domizio has to say: “In line with the essence of our task, we used contemporary means to model a form within Nature—striving and hoping to effect a transformation in humankind at the same time” On September 25, 2005 the hypogeum was ready to receive the figures who came from all over Europe for its opening, when a plaque reading // Luogo della Natura was fixed to a large block of sandstone before the entrance gate. The avenue to the entrance to the hypogeum is an installation by VItantonio Russo. Symbolizing the intereommunication between technology and art, this Mònadi takes the form of an itinerary towards knowledge. Indeed, the profound significance of the work is revealed in its title: monads are simple indivisible particles which become active through reciprocal collaboration. Evoking cooperation and inter communication between people, the work itself serves as a preface to the magnificent experience awaiting the visitor. Made up of light sources separated by yellow spirit levels, the installation symbolizes a possible balance between technology and nature. The light diffusers themselves symbolize the need for communication; illuminating the route to the hypogeum, they facilitate comprehension of the cultural goals which inspired the whole structure. The spirit levels, on the other hand, mark out the course, highlighting the need for balanced collaboration between the various disciplines. On each side, the path is lined by rows of purple-berried pyracanta coccinea, embodying the presence of Nature within this installation-as-environment. Exemplifying the “Economic Art” in which Russo explores the possibility of collaboration between art, economics and technology, this work accompanies the visitor to the large entrance to the hypogeum: a concrete wall with a steel door and a plaque which reads // Luogo della Natura. Servizi e Magazzini della Piantagione Paradise. The choice of words is far from casual. In effect, this structure aims to provide back-up facilities (servizi) for the plantation. Intended to facilitate the realization of the Beuysian ideals underlying the very creation of 402

the plantation, it provides facilities at the service of those using it: toilets, conference rooms and bookshop. It was clearly inspired by the desire felt by Lucrezia De Domizio and her collaborators to make this place the key point of reference for Post-Beuys Bolognano. Furthermore, the archive material it stores and the cultural initiatives it hosts make the hypogeum into a sort of cultural warehouse containing: ... an ordered accumulation of partial ideas, serving not only art and culture but all the other disciplines whose practical application over recent years has shown signs of atrophy: first of all agricultural, then economics, work, pedagogy, scientific research, the study of social structures and the safeguarding of the environment (from both an ecological and anthropological perspective). However, the Magazzino is no static deposit; it envisages Movement and careful attention to time and action. It is no coincidence that the Italian word for container/display case is teca, deriving from the Ancient Greek word for “a storeroom," a warehouse of things that require continual protection before they can be distributed. Thus the Luogo della Natura is a large teca protecting both concrete and practical ideas, ordering them according to need and then distributing them beyond clear concrete walls that are open to the world of art and the world beyond art. Dedicated to the great thinker Harald Szeemann and his family, the structure commemorates Buby Durini and Joseph Beuys himself. There are two underground floors of around 500 square metres each. The first is a single concrete cube, comprising the atrium which occupies the entire floor. The walls and ceiling are in unfaced reinforced concrete, whilst the floor is polished concrete. All of the pipes and wiring are integrated within the body of the structure, whilst lighting comes from filiform neon that runs around the top of the walls, like so many veins illuminating the body-hypogeum. The defining characteristic of this first space is its dual openings, for directly opposite the entrance is another door—a mirror image—that leads through to the area in front of Joseph Beuys's Studio. Both wide open, these doors create a spontaneous play of light and shadow, with the interior appearing rich in symbolism. And as one passes over the threshold, one leaves behind the world of the everyday and immerses oneself in the “organism” of the hypogeum, through which one must pass in order to reach the threshold of the Beuysian Locus of Nature.The spartan interior generates a very special atmosphere, which is in keeping with the concepts that the structure aims

to express.

following pages Joseph Beuys, // Luogo della Natura. Servizi e Magazzini della Piantagione Paradise, Bolognano

A staircase located along the long west wall of the structure takes one down to the floor beneath; within this short stretch of concrete wall a showcase contains all the books and magazines which have been edited or produced by Lucrezia De Domizio, works that reveal forty years of intense work dedicated to the promotion of cultural activities. The second floor has a large open atrium that is laid out to host conferences, debates, concerts, video screenings and performance 403

NATU nIla

romgtle

Dediento Imeborg

l'aradivo Md

turaig

Naemann Lischer "allo doro Mulo Lina 24 settombro 2008 dI Ruby Durial

© Joseph beuys

worms dl vv Vito Povia Pari Hora Lin ui Do Para h Aeg

art. To one side are large armchairs and a coffee table, forming a relaxation area where one can read in peace. This atrium ends in the wall that defines the space used to store books, whilst behind the long wall to one side of the room (used as a screen for projections) there is another room. A sort of long corridor, this serves as the hypogeum archives, within which is a sizeable library of material available to scholars and experts. At the end of that gallery a second flight of steps leads outside the structure, linking it with the external facilities. From there cobbled steps run around the outside of Beuys's studio, which is conserved as an emblem of his presence here. The external surroundings are magnificent, with a smooth lawn leading to the bookshop, a structure in local stone that is draped with vines. Alongside is the large oak tree planted by Beuys on that famous May 13, 1984 and still flourishing. Opposite the bookshop is a bed of rosemary which marks the boundary between the flat area and the wide valley of the plantation that opens up all around. This is also the location of the three red benches of Marco Bagnoli's Per la Pace nel Tibet; inspired by the pianist Marco Rapattoni, who has often given wonderful concerts here, they invite us to pause, rest and contemplate the landscape. From this raised area of the plantation the tall steel poles of another work by Marco Bagnoli—Dharma of Enel —are immediately visible. A permanent sculpture, this comprises five power pylons painted red and set in place across the plantation as symbols of the five continents. A leitmotif that identifies Bagnoli's work and is a key to an understanding of his poetics, the colour red can be seen as exemplifying creative energy. A call for a balance between technology, Nature and humankind, this work was the culmination of a project that started in 1976, when Bagnoli first undertook his artistic explorations of the concepts of spiritual and scientific energy—explorations that would result in the development of a full artistic poetics. The title itself is significant: Dharma comes from the Sanskrit dher, which indicates the act of supporting or bearing up, whilst Enel is a reference to a work Bagnoli first showed at the 1976 Venice Biennale (a work which might be seen as the prelude to his later explorations). Dharma is also the title of a scientific text by the artist himself, in which he explains the concepts underlying works predicated upon constant interaction of space and time, matter and thought. Over the years, a total of 72 artists have left Segnali Stabili (Fixed Signals) within the plantation, making it into a very special place. Set amidst the trees and shrubs that extend to the river Orta, some are immediately visible, others extend below ground level and others are even destined to disappear altogether. Forming a sort of “plaque,” these are a visible sign of the permanent presence of creative individuals, whose endeavors have contributed to the realization of the Beuysian concept underlying the Paradise Plantation. 406

11. Free International Forum

If the place that most fully expresses Beuysian Bolognano is the hypogeum, then the event which does so is the “Free International Forum” Held every two years in Abruzzo, it is modelled upon various famous Beuysian projects. Bringing together delegates from the Free International University, it symbolizes the intent to pursue the path initially charted by the great German artist. An institution created by Beuys himself, the FI.U.now strives to be a point of reference that offers an alternative to the usual mechanisms of art and culture. 1999 also saw the foundation of the FIUWAC (Free International University World Art Collection), an open institution that declares itself the property of the entire population of the world and brings together delegates from Holland, Ireland, Germany, Denmark, France, Italy and the USA. This body provides sizeable support for the cultural initiatives of its Italian representative, Lucrezia De Domizio; for example, the Beuys Event held at the 52nd Venice Biennale was organized by the FI.U. During the biennial FIF there are conferences, concerts, debates and performances, all of which attract artists, scholars, critics and curators to Bolognano from around the world. Received here by Lucrezia De Domizio, these guests are inspired by the desire to immerse themselves in an oasis of art and culture predicated upon the universal ideals championed by Beuys himself. The events themselves can cover a very varied field of themes: great contemporary literature, social and economic issues, ecology, art criticism, avant-garde poetry, music and theatre—in short, everything that comes within the domain of “culture!” Exploring the vast field of intereommunication—and enjoying performances by various great artists and musicians—the participants pursue the ideal vision of total interchange and engagement between scientific and artistic disciplines. It was, for example, during the Forum that such initiatives as Vetrine notturne, Segnali Stabili and the various Case were presented to the public. The Fourth Free International Forum was held in July 2010 and saw the active participation of all members of the various FI.U.throughout the world. 12. Bolognano Today: The Relation with Society as a Whole Here one must answer a final question raised by this study: how is one to explain that such an unusual and fascinating place is largely unknown both to the general public and scholars of the arts? One reason is clearly the point already made with regard to its location: this is a place that is not on the usual tourist itineraries, at most attracting nature excursionists. The present-day redevelopment of Bolognano as part of the Beyond Museums; In Defence of Art project is largely the fruit of the passion and dedication of one woman, Lucrezia De Domizio. With her great knowledge of— and commitment to—the arts, it is she who has brought all this about; investing herself both physically and financially, she might in a certain sense be said to have modelled the place in her own 407

image. The whole project is predicated upon the pursuit of an art which is democratic, which reflects the need for intercommunication and collaboration between human beings—and also the need to protect these ideals from any baneful influence that might be exerted by contemporary society. For a moment let us consider the entire Bolognano project as an attempt to defend humankind and culture (in the Beuysian sense of the term) against a world that now seems defenceless against the mechanisms of capitalism. The place thus seems to reflect the sensibility of the artist himself. Satisfying the need for spaces of total concentration, it establishes a sense of complicity between work of art and spectator (through the return to a certain intimacy of feeling and reaction). But the place also—and above all—raises subtle resistance to the very idea of a globalized world. In effect, it is a utopian oasis which has magically been made a reality. However to maintain this dream as a reality one has, in some way, to keep jealous guard over it, keep it concealed from most people in order to safeguard its integrity and freedom from contamination. Hence one understands why this place has become known only to a certain “cultural elite"—not an elite of distinguished academics but rather a community of great individuals, artists, critics and scholars, who have responded to the very daring of the project and worked free of charge towards its realization. Such an observation is not intended as a criticism in itself. Instead, it aims to explain a key aspect of a project which remains, first and foremost, a gift offered to society as a whole; which, placed at the disposal of the entire community, aims ultimately to be a source of culturally nourishing experience. A work-in-progress, the Bolognano project is still open to new initiatives. Ultimately, the hope is that every street and every abandoned house will contain “fixed signals” of culture and art; that—thanks to new projects initiated by Lucrezia De Domizio—those responsible for such matters will adequately promote this place at an international level. For Bolognano is a contemporary masterpiece which belongs to the whole of humanity and to future generations. In every way, it is the equal of those renowned museums which enjoy universal fame but are often devoid of the love and passion one finds here.

La Casa della Critica

La Casa degli Ospiti

La Casa dell'Arte

"LA CASA DELL'ART Omagzio alla ramiitia ZARI

CRI

en logi LES til

We need to anticipate the future world so that we can use it by way ofan example; this way we can turn Italy into what this country already

actually is, a PARADISE

(Joseph Beuys)

Readings

The following writings come from the texts of intellectuals who have known, collaborated with and shared Beuysian thinking. me to underscore the authors of these essays is the loyalty they great German Master especially after his death, disseminating through their loyal behaviour and using every means available:

in the course of their lives But what has encouraged have always shown for the their understanding of him conferences, publications, essays, meetings, images, videos, noble Beuysian teachings aimed at recalling the essential principles of nature and humankind. A generous and ethical pathway for a new vision of art and the betterment of society. Necessary today more than ever. | have involved illustrious thinkers in this Post-Beuys phase in a number of cireumstances and international events, and some of their essays can be found in various publications issued in both Italian and English versions: The magazine R/SK arte oggi, Il Clavicembolo Editore, Milan 1996/2007/2009; Joseph Beuys. L'Immagine dell'Umanità, Silvana Editoriale, Milan 2001; Bolognano. La Spiritualità di Joseph Beuys. Silvana Editoriale, Milan 2002. My deepest gratitude goes to these figures for their loyal and generous collaboration in tribute to the noble Living Sculpture by Joseph Beuys.

411

FIRST READING Felix Baumann

Joseph Beuys. The stone is the sculpture of life In everything that has been written about Joseph Beuys there seems to be a common opinion that his work does not follow definite stylistic parameters and, consequently, does not present any evolution of style. Two of the most renowned experts on Beuys work—Franz Joseph van der Grinten and Heiner Bastian—developed precisely this theory in the rich catalogue of the Zurich retrospective exhibition of 1993-94. “Joseph Beuys's artistic work is unmistakable not for its precise style, in fact his works show no stylistic development...) writes Franz Joseph van der Grinten. And Heiner Bastian observes that “the conventions and paradigms of a so-called stylistic evolution were not the artist's aim.’ Nevertheless, there are some discernible characteristics that distinguish one given creative period from another. Let us consider, for instance, the religious objects of the 1950s, which fade out into the Fluxus actions in 1962, or the years dedicated to teaching and other activities, and then the 1980s, Beuys's last creative period, with its extraordinary synthesis of all the research and experience of his past. | believe that the most significant components of Beuys's complex thought are to be found together in one specific series of works. The fact that we are dealing with such an atypical and emblematic personage (“personage” is used deliberately, since in this context the term "artist" seems too narrow) makes us hesitate in under scoring individual aspects—which means a sharp focus, and thus the risk of neglecting other factors in the totality of his expanded concept of art. | would like to focus my attention on three works that have a philological unity, without adopting any kind of interpretative approach: it all began in 1982 with the 7000 Oaks for Kassel, continued in 1982 with The End of the Twentieth Century, and concluded with Olivestone in 1984. These monumental sculptures may be considered a trilogy crowning Beuys's entire work. | believe that with this series Beuys has attained an extreme synthesis, coherent in both content and form. A profound analysis of these last works, in relation to the multiform operations of the artist, brings out his heightened concern with the formal element—sculptural in this case—with respect to his previous creative phases. At the same time, this new formal expression gradually leaves action behind. VVhile the 7000 Oaks operation may still be considered an action that has found a continuous expression in sculpture, Olivestone is not preceded by action of any kind. The consolidation of the formal aspects can be traced to the use of stone as the main carrier of meaning in all three sculptures. Stone is a material that had played a secondary role in his previous works. In Beuys's theory of sculpture, stone, as inorganic and crystalline material, had been a symbol of reason and cold, solidification, in4712

Joseph Beuys, Olivestone, Castello di Rivoli, December 1984

ertia, and death—the very opposite of spiritual creativity, intuition, heat, the amorphous state, and live organic matter. It is fascinating how Beuys was able to overcome this duality of heat and cold, reason and intuition, life and death—how

he animated stones that

in themselves are dead by calling them back to life. In the Kassel action, this was obtained by matching stone and tree, maintaining duality in a paratactic parallelism. The young tree placed beside the single basalt stele represents evolution, triumph of potency, and vital ecological strength. And if the tree dies some day, the stone will survive unchanged—but the tree, the principle of life (and the related principle of freedom) will have developed and multiplied. The basalt stones of the work The End of the Twentieth Century are brought to life, since in the outer part (which is a third of the whole) of each single block the geometric form of a cone has been cut out and then reinserted with a protective layer of clay and/or felt. This way, the basalt stone seems to have an eye, and is thus raised to a higher level of meaning. In the above-mentioned Zurich catalogue, Johannes Sùttgen speaks explicitly of stones that know (“material

ism is over—even the stones know it”).

Felix Baumann

Testimony Starting out from the beginning of the 1980s, the Commission of the ZUrcher Kunsthaus had actively tried to purchase an important work by Joseph Beuys. Important works were already to be found in the “Graphics Collection” Numerous works were taken into consideration although a convinced and unanimous decision was only possible when the possibility of acquiring Olivestone presented itself. Irrespective of the fact that this is undoubtedly one of the artist's most important late works, of such pregnant and rigorous form, precisely this work was able to be integrated particularly well within the collection of the Kunsthaus in which the plastic art of the 20th century plays such a pre-eminent role. In fact, Olivestone is as much a classical stone sculpture as it is a work in which a new material—olive oil—expresses an interpretative meaning from a particular point of view. Beuys had already referred to the innovative material in his previous works in such a way as to make it the harbinger of meanings and references to intellectual processes perceptible not only on the optical plane. For example, when felt and fat symbolized heat and energy Beuys was not necessarily referring to physical heat but to “intellectual or evolutionistic heat" Olivestone lives as the result of the tension between the “organic principle"—visualized by way of the olive oil-and the “crystalline” principle, expressed by the stone parallelepipeds. For Beuys this meant the general tension between chaos and form. On more than one occasion Beuys had explained his “plastic theory" of the development of amorphous and chaotic 414

following pages Felix Baumann and Lucrezia De Domizio, Olivestone arriving at the Kunsthaus ZUrich,

energy bywayofthe movementinthe crystalline form, corresponding to the “intuition-reason,'“hot-cold” and “life-death” polarities. In his works one always finds the concept of flux, of flowing, which for him was the expression of vitality and creativity, the starting point of foree—also in man—in contrast to the consolidation in crystalline form which can mean stiffening (or cooling) and, consequentily, death. Beuys aspired to amplifying the linguistic field: that is, by way of matter he tried to express what escapes or eludes the word. It was very important for him to come close to the most elementary forces and represent them. He wanted to escape from the fixing form and, therefore, from the rationale of a sole visuality in order to restore the unity of intuition and intellect which had been lost. With Olivestone, this refound unity is directly perceived by the senses. | personally saw Olivestone for the first time in the autumn of 1985, at the same time as the exhibition entitled “Joseph Beuys, Olfarben 1949-1987” (Joseph Beuys, oil colours 1949-1987) held at the Kunsthaus. lt was precisely at this point in time that the first steps were made for the acquisition of the work. In particular, Harald Szeemann directly made the request to the artist and to the work's owner, Baroness De Domizio Durini, the latter deciding that the Kunsthaus could have purchased Olivestone had the Castello di Rivoli (Turin) not exerted the right of pre-emption before the expiry of the loan contract. Given that this pre-emptive right was not exercised, in May 1986—unfortunately following the death of Joseph Beuys—a delegation ofthe Collections Commission visited Rivoli to see the work and on October 31, 1986 a preliminary agreement was stipulated between the ZUrcher Kunstgesellschaft and Lucrezia De Domizio for the acquisition of Olivestone. A subsequent controversy which arose before an Italian Court concerning the ownership or Olivestone notoriously delayed the conclusion of the negotiations. For the Kunsthaus there followed months—or better, years— or trepidation and hope. It was for this reason that the decision communicated to me in person by Baron Giuseppe Durini on Holy Thursday or 1990 proved to be so disturbing: in short, that his wife would make a present of the work to the Kunsthaus, with the proviso that ownership be acknowledged on the final ruling in the pending law suit. This right was recognized on December 12, 1991. The signature was officially affixed to the donation deed in Milan on the May 12, 1990, Joseph Beuys's birthday. At the time | could not imagine the motivation for the donation. And if today | believe | have understood the reason then my esteem for Lucrezia De Domizio Baroness Durini has only grown. | support the conviction of the magnanimous benefactress: it was Beuys's wish that Olivestone should find a safe and permanent home in the Kunsthaus. And if now—and once again on the May 12, 1992—the new installation can be presented to the public, then this day is for all those who feel part of the Kunsthaus both a day of joy and gratitude towards Lucrezia De Domizio Durini. (from L. De Domizio, Libro Bianco Olivestone, Kunsthaus Zurich — Carte Segrete, Rome 1992)

April 3, 1992 415

SECOND READING

The magic of logos Conversation between Joseph Beuys and Amnon Barzel at the Venice Biennale, June 1976 Amnon Barzel: It is very difficult to find out the truth. It is difficult for everybody, in every field, but especially in art. How can we find the truth in art? Joseph Beuys: Nothing is more important than finding the point of truth. Everyone feels out of the society. It is necessary to enlarge the understanding of art and of new art theories. As long as the artist concentrates on innovation of styles, as long as the artist does not transform his understanding of art, he cannot relate to people in the world and to the problems of the social body. As long as he does not understand art, there can be no evolution in art. A.B.: But, as art is an individual creation—it comes out from the individual, it is not theoryr—how could it come from theory? A good artist should have a kind of measure. How do we know that we are on the right way? How do we know that we can discover the truth? Maybe we are wrong. J.B.: You must refer to a system and think about the quality of the individual production, because not everything produced by an individual is of good quality. So, the individual must criticize his own production, and, at the same time the control criteria he applies, as It is for theory. Methodology can suggest the right direction. And then he must have other people to help him criticize his production, without saying “no, this is my production, | am right.” | cannot say | am right if the others do not agree or do not understand, | cannot be as radical as political parties are: “we are right and all the others are wrong.” There is much arrogance in the behaviour of artists, when they believe too much in their creativity and say “this is the best product." Instead, they should ask for different opinions and say “| tried to do my best, but now | need your help to improve my work.” This is what | would call a dialogue, a social behaviour. The other one Is an individualistic and therefore bourgeois behaviour, an oldfashioned, traditional, egoistic behaviour. A.B.: Yes, | agree with you. | would like to add something on the

uncertainty of the artist. Art must be based on doubt. When the artist becomes sure of himself, it is the end. The same occurs with political parties: when a political party is 418

sure of everything it is doing, it starts to use the power against things that should not be opposed.

J.B.: / see it in another way. You should not bring irrationality and uncertainty in art. Certainly, the artist is unsure but art must, nevertheless, try to deliver the best production. When people see the production, they realise the direction of the human race towards the future. Art must be for people who live and grow old. Art stems from the earth, from nature, from the cooperation between freedom and culture, art is equality in the democratic sense. A.B.: Between peoples of all nations, between everybody. J.B.: Yes, but | only speak about people and not nations. Art is a cultural, economic, democratic activity and that is why art must be formed, must be moulded and must create a process in which everybody can participate: this is the radical change in the understanding of art. No more artists related to artists only. In my opinion, every living being is an artist and, since at present not everyone can be an artist, then education must be organized in another way. VVe need a free culture, which does not mean freedom only for the artist, but freedom of educational means, of production. lt means universities... A.B. All schools then...

J.B.: Yes, and all the institutions that can mould the ability of the people in the future, an ability influenced and regulated by state interests, by political interests. Otherwise our future will be regulated according to these interests, it will be characterised by decay and corruption. National and international terrorism intend to separate people from our ideas of liberalism and pluralism. We need the power to join people as now, it is the idea of division that prevails. A.B.: Yes, this is what happens in Israel, in Ireland... J.B.: The artist cannot formulate a radically different, total under standing of art and creativity as long as he works isolated, along traditional lines, following tradition. That is why, in order to change, artists must see new things, they must formulate new theories and control their activity and their work. On the one hand, the artist must consider his work as a picture, an open image, unfinished: everyone needs to experience his own imagination. But on the other hand, as an artist, | have to formulate, very logically, my idea of a direction in which culture shall be organized, in order to avoid the manipulation of the state, of governments, of political parties which bring to a misleading understanding of the ideas of freedom and equality. Economy should be better regulated, even monetary problems are out of control. All governments 419

want is to maintain the power, even if this means to go bankrupt.

Then, it is necessary to control people and this leads to political

agreements between states, between the CIA and other secret services. These are dangers concerning people living all over the world. So that is why artists should feel responsible...

A.B.: Do you mean that artists should be involved in politics? J.B.: No, politics is a very old-fashioned drug, politics must be transformed into art and creativity because all problems in the world are problems of form: how to do something, how to manage something, how to organise things in such a way that all needs, of all people in the world, can be satisfied. In my opinion all these problems are related to the form, to the moulding ... Gestaltung is the real mission of the artist and all is form: an engineer has to form, in his project he must think about his way of production, a teacher has to form, a mother has to form, people in the hospitals have to form, the whole world is only a problem of form and now what we have is a very bad form and this form can destroy the planet.

A.B.: Do you think that a work of art must be judged by its form or by its social message?

J.B.: If a social message has the right form, what's the use of form? Every message has its form: we can speak about art form, written forms in literature or newspapers. Each behaviour, each message Is form. If a message has the right form and can over come the differences between people—such are for example, the ideas of freedom, equality for human and civil rights, but not economic ideas for example, because their message has not the right form; when people feel involved and can participate. lt should be the same for the activity of political parties. Political parties should find a third way, a promotional initiative, a practical way to work out an alternative to the existing Western and Eastern systems. A.B.: What's the answer then?

J.B.: The answer is to think about the idea of self-organisation, selfadministration, in order to avoid the influence of government. The goal would be to build up a democratic structure, but before, we have to care about education and avoid the influence of state power. We must try to get free, try to use and consider money in a democratic way, since, if there are no rules for money, artistic need is limited and art is interesting only for a few persons, as it happens in the US, let's think about Rockefeller for example. A.B.: | think that talking with people is very important. People often do not talk together, do not discuss, do not listen to each other. This is the real problem of our society. We should change the whole 420

system, listen to each other, understand each other and think. From there we can start and go further on. But before, we must learn to listen. Sometimes we do not talk, we discuss with ourselves, we only listen to what we say we do not listen to what the other says or asks. And when we give an answer, our answer is not an answer, it is a declaration. J.B.: It is what | call the need to discuss, the need to achieve a real

dialogue.

A.B.: This is what | was saying, it is very important to talk to people. J.B.: The discussion about the existing problems is not the real dialogue between human beings. Creativity can reveal the real abilities of people, it makes people free and responsible for their decisions. So, we can create a free culture, a radical free culture, not only in the field of art, but in education, in universities, in TV radio and newspapers, applying the ideas of self-determination. A.B.: But you are one of the artists who uses TV, media, etc. J.B.: Yes, | use all possibilities.

A.B.: | remember your debates, standing for hours, talking to the TV, to people, using all those mass media that you attack, because, as you say, they are good for brainwashing. So... J.B.: We have to make a distinction: sure, information in general is a mean to brainwash people but you must not mix. Now, when | am speaking l am participating in the brainwashing but, at the same time, | try to oppose it. Sometimes, when | speak about this, my talks are cut, information can be manipulated, but | have to use the media.

A.B.: But | don't know if they realize you are using them...You are the most photographed artist of our century... J.B.: Fine. A.B.: Yes, but may be all these big mass media that conquered the world, the media you attack, are using you. You must understand whether and how they are using you.

J.B.: Yes, they use me and | use them. A.B.: Yes, but this is a sensitive point, we want to attack them but they use art as a mean, as an instrument for all the system.

J.B.: Yes, but you must make a distinction. Certainly, in general, 421

mass media are the main institutions promoting brainwashing, but there are some elements in them that could also share our ideas. May be there was a misunderstanding, but | see what you mean... A.B.: Do you believe in the power of art to change the social structure and the political situation?

J.B.: Yes, it is possible, but first of all you have to change the understanding of art. The rules, structures, the organization of modern art are old-fashioned. There are no revolutions, only evolutions: a style after another after another... this cannot lead to a revolution in art, this is only technique and in this way you cannot reach everybody in the society or make everybody able to understand art. | am not against innovations in themselves, but these innovations only produce new styles, they do not lead to the real, human understanding of art, related to the needs of people and the problems within the society. This has to be the idea of the transformation of art and for that we need a theory, a tool: thinking. Thinking, strong thinking, philosophical thinking, scientific thinking, imagination, intuition, inspiration can allow us, together with other people, to find an understanding of art which could change the rules of society, all over the world. All other means are useless for this purpose: they lack something and cannot achieve this goal. Let's think about modern science, for example. It is a complete mystification of the things of the world, it is only connected to the idea of production of material goods: cars, refrigerators, going to the moon, building industries and at the same time, destroying the planet. Instead, creativity is related to the principle of freedom... A.B.: In your work, at the Guggenheim Museum, you are dealing with memories, your personal mythology, the iron man... how do you consider these works? A kind of nostalgia? J.B.: /t not personal mythology. If |had forgotten Sebastian Bach, Mozart or Wolfgang Goethe, it would be a problem. | cannot consider my work as the product of my own individuality. You see, we have all to find a balance between the problems of the past, of the present and of the future and therefore, | investigate the whole history, trying to do an historical analysis to find points of development. There are people who are working for this revolution, trying to solve the problems of the future as to linger over the past would be a bourgeois diminishing of the understanding of real research. Talking about art as something related to the past is not very interesting... as | said before. If you are not able to search the future, you can take your biography and find your own resources in the childhood, you cannot create or take things from the future. During my whole life | had things in my mind and | have tried to 422

realize them, starting from my childhood as | had some very important intuitions in that time of my life. | tried to restore these intuitions during my whole life. A.B.: | think there's something like a temporary cancellation of art and this signal could be crucial. May be we should stop and think about it. J.B.: Yes, stop a moment, think about problems, about the situation: produce, produce, make innovations, style after style, body art, language art, conceptual art, and so on. A.B.: But there's something else | am worried about. When an artist is making a form, he wants this form to be complete, to be alive, but every form has different associations for different people. You said you have thought about this iron man for many years... also this railway, for me, has a very strong association... (They are talking about a work by J. Beuys: 7ram Stop, which was exhibited at the Biennale.) And also, when | saw the human figure, | thought about a lot of associations. So | am not sure if you are doing it just because it is a form. To me, it is not only a form, to me the iron man, Tram Stop are not only a form... J.B.: All you can experience, all that is more than form, all dimensions that are more than form, can be created only through the form. So all an artist can do is to create a form and nothing else and the arrangement of the form gives people the ability to associate all the other dimensions. All dimensions are based on the arrangement of form and nothing else. A.B.: So there are no new forms, all forms we are using... we are actually re-making old forms, taking forms that have been used by other people before us. So every form is a kind of association. What does happen to this association? J.B.: Your idea of association is a little bit dangerous. | think people look for the form and that the first thing people experience is not the association: they look at the object, they do not look for the association. Then, it obvious that we all see something different in an object, everyone has his own personality and sees things in a different way, but a tree is a tree for everybody. There's no differ ence in the research of the form... I think it is necessary to use the idea of association, it is only a matter of perception, | have my own perception, you have yours... A.B.: Yes, | agree with you, but if you take a tree and put it inside this room, the meaning changes completely, the tree acquires a different meaning and you put it here because you want to transmit a message... If you take a tree and put it in this room, it has a different meaning... 423

J.B.: Of course, | make a form for a certain meaning.

A.B.: And then, by changing the meaning sage.

you change the mes-

J.B.: Of course, | change the meaning and consequently | change the message.

Joseph Beuys visiting Dani Karavan's Israeli pavilion with Amnon Bazel, Venice Biennale 1976

424

Memory is another form of nostalgia... Conversation between Joseph Beuys and Amnon Barzel, EI.U. - Free International University Documenta VI, Kassel, 29 June 1977 Introduction by Amnon Barzel As | told you before, | want this conversation between us to be recorded and heard by students of art and maybe by other students in Israel, so that they can listen to your ideas. Then maybe we could cooperate in the near future, starting to establish there a Free International University. | will also discuss administrative questions and the possibilities to keep in touch in the near future. The idea is to create a group that will start working on the basis of these ideas. Now I think it is the right time, because of the change in the political situation in Israel and the difficulties we will encounter in trying to educate people to think freely and change the system. We talked about this also in Venice last year and we laid stress on the need for a change in the educational system. What | would like now is to draw some ideas. We could read here, food for thought you call it!... Joseph Beuys: Yes, this is a basis to start from. When | speak about a new educational method what | mean is a real, wide understanding of art and creativity, not only in relation to the so called issues of modern art, restricted to the artist, museums,

exhibitions, art galler-

les and so on, but to culture in general. Thus, | intend to refer to all cultural “powers,” also in the realm of information, such as newspapers, radio, TV education, schools, elementary and higher schools, universities, etc. A wider understanding of art and, in particular, the anthropological understanding of art is related to the organization of culture. Starting from these ideas of renewal, culture can develop independently from the states, while, at present, the main cultural institutions (schools, universities) are organized by the state, are state-enterprises. So, these enterprises can be influenced by the ideas of the state and of international economic powers (in terms of ideologies, interests, capitalistic ideas on the one side or, on the other side, in the Eastern block, by the ideas of a bureaucratic, monopolistic state). That is why the very first issue is that culture must be independent from governments, also as to its administrative aspects. This could certainly be defined as a cultural revolution: people become more and more free, and get more and more knowledge about the self-administration of culture. This also entails the idea of self-determination which, in its turn, can bring about changes in law, democracy (in democratic laws as well), in the democratic feeling that everybody is equal before the constitution. These are the forces of culture related to the freedom of everybody in the world. The second issue concerns the powers (in the sense of the power system, its mechanisms) which have to be regulated by the peo425

ple and not according to the principle of authority from the top, or by the interests of economic, financial, industrial and multinationals powers. Democratic forces should be established from the grassroots, by people, as a constellation of laws among which the most important ones would be economic laws, that is to say laws concerning economic practices, since the reason why the whole social body is in such a state of “illness” is related to a series of “bad”

financial laws (based on the distorted ideology of profit and property of both capitalist and monopolistic systems), often dictated by multinationals which can exert their power even on governments. As a matter of fact, two kinds of governments exist: the economic government, depending from economic interests, multinationals (and subsequently from their profit, property and “racism-driven” ideology) and national governments, which, in a certain way, are part of the system. Therefore, to get free as soon as possible, we started our struggle in the field of culture and cultural evolution. Also in Marxist thesis, the most important production is the one involving the spirit, that is science and culture and after a new production has been achieved in culture, it becomes possible to apply it in the economic and democratic fields. Yet, |am not saying that culture |s a lower structure but that it is a fundamental production, at the basis of everything else. This is one dimension of the Free University and we are trying to bring together people from all over the world, to produce an alternative system and change the society. Amnon Barzel: You mean: to eliminate the borders between people—because, you know, these borders are part of the system, of the international system.To rule and to divide.

J.B.: Bertolt Brecht says in one of his poems: “When people begin to talk together, then problemscan be soon overcome.” One of the difficulties that we encounter in trying to establish cultural relationships with other people who think like us, let's say in Israel or Libya, Egypt or free China, is that the system of these countries do not let them doing it. It considers these people as enemies, but they are not at all enemies. So what we need first is to establish a connection between all these countries, between all the people who think in the same way. A.B.: The question is how to start to change things without the support of the establishment of every country. If, for example we need a certain budget, granted by the establishment, then we are in its hands. J.B.: Not necessarily. If you accept funds from governments or from private sources, you have only to care that, once funds have been granted, no one has the right to influence things. This is a crucial point. Besides, it is also important to understand how these funds can circulate and investigate how financial loans and the banking system work (this is something | am very interested in). | would 426

lite to underline that financial laws or laws regulating funding procedures reflect the level of “consciousness” of our time and not of 300 years ago. Therefore it is important to know and to understand this system. A.B.: | would like to dwell on another point. We are talking to young artists, to those students who have studied art styles, art history, and we have to tell them to work in the present, with the present, with life itself and society and try to change it. Yet, can they do all this with the methods and “instruments” they learned? J.B.: No, they cannot do that. And this underlines, once again, that the initial struggle must involve culture and that is why the knowledge and understanding of art and science are extremely important. But not the old, traditional knowledge, stemming from the descriptions we find in books, of materialistic, positivistic, atomistic type. VVe tried to develop an enlarged understanding of art, involving the notion of the anthropological characteristics of art, considering not only the traditional notion of artist, but the more general notion of labour and labourer as, all over the world, the artist is a labourer. In my opinion this is what the knowledge and understanding of art, of the consciousness of time and of the artist, imply. lt means to understand art in relation to all problems exIsting in the society. It is a material which must be shaped through the consciousness of time and not through the interests of a small minority which wants to rule on the basis of the consciousness of 200 years ago. That is a past, outdated, old consciousness that cannot be used to change society. A.B.: Speaking of changes in art and in art styles, could we say that art is an enclosed circle? Do museums, galleries, artists, critics form an enclosed circle? J.B.: Yes, it is an enclosed circle, a cage and not a free area. It is a cage where the system tries to collect all “crazy” people. Because, for governments, artists are necessarily mad, lunatic people. They can be decorative sometimes, but, for the system artists are of no importance, nothing. They are used as alibis to show how liberal governments are. Governments need artists for that. Therefore, once more, this evolution, this revolution has to start form the cultural area, from the understanding of art, science, creativity, from education, information and the idea of self-determination. It must soon become independent from the influence of the state and economic powers.

A.B.: Does this work have to be done in the society itself, also at the local level? Local societies reflect the same problems encountered in all societies all over the world, don't they? J.B.: Yes, it is possible and it is a simple thing in principle because 427

you only have to stimulate the interest of people. | cannot imagine that people could not be interested in such a human technique, in creating new models, in establishing new freedom in culture for everybody, in cooperating with other populations and so on. | cannot imagine that such a model, which we are trying to develop and show everywhere, cannot arouse people's interest and we already see the first results. This idea arouses a lot of interest as a radical alternative to the existing system, both in the East and in the West.

A.B.: Would you suggest to young artists to start working with a small community, with part of the society itself? J.B.: Yes, but not only to artists, to the so-called artists because in this new anthropological view of art, everybody is an artist, also a dustman is an artist. We want to work with these people, we want our understanding to be related to the labour and not to the artist or to the art only, as it occurs in traditional culture. A.B.: How would you define the position and the meaning of art and artists today? J.B.: At present, the artist is someone working in a cage, within the system. He is not able to go beyond the borders of this isolation that is called cultural scene or art or modern art, but we are here to show people an alternative. It is an occasion. For example, yesterday we recelved an official invitation to go to East Germany and talk about these subjects. It is a formidable occasion for me: to go there and talk with people, tell them what they can do.

A.B.: Would East Germany accept such a cultural programme? J.B.: Of course, they do not like it, but you see, our radio transmission, which is broadcasted in West Germany, is also heard in East Germany. Everybody can hear it, they can also watch our TV programmes. Everybody, in East Germany watch West Germany TV. and so, they also know our programmes.

A.B.: Then perhaps for the first time, people from the DDR can discover your ideas. So the revolution can be made through the use of the international capitalistic system (TV, satellite, etc.). You certainly remember that last year we talked about the issue of the “use” You are against the system but you use it and this is an example. JiBinYes.

A.B.: Are there any theories or books which you recommend young students? 428

to

J.B.: This book for example: “Social Sculpture.” It gives some very interesting general ideas. A.B.: Ok, | would like to keep in touch with you. Can | write directly to you?

J.B. Yes, of course. (Beuys gives Barzel his personal address)

Joseph Beuys, Dani Karavan, Amnon

Bazel,

Venice Biennale 1976

429

THIRD READING The Historical Course of the Work GRASSELLO Ca (OH), +H,O Gabriella Belli, Pierparide Tedeschi and LDD From the volume // Grassello, Mart, Rovereto 2002 Foreword by Lucrezia De Domizio This publication is something | have deeply desired in order to clarify once and for all, before the cultural world of Italian and international art, my position as a woman and as an intellectual. It is my wish to dedicate this volume as a sign of gratitude to three grand personages who have had the courage to follow, defend, and to love TRUTH. First and foremost my late husband, Buby Durini, who with constancy and patience photographed in Italy and in many countries of the world my regal adventure lived out at the side of one of the greatest visionaries of world culture, Joseph Beuys, Universal Architect. One man, Beuys, the most significant artist of the second post-war, vho invented no method but chose to labor his whole life outside the confines of the systems of Art for the betterment of mankind. My photographic archive contains around 33,000 images, while the black-and-white and color Videotech offers a phenomenological unicum of truth of the works and the actions, of the times and the places, of the privileged relationship, which | had the good fortune to enjoy from 1972 right to the very day of the death of the Master. To Harald Szeemann, a rare individual, who loved Beuysian thought and was a faithful constructor. A singularly responsible international critic who with moral force knew how to meticulously collocate Joseph Beuys's Italian Operation Defence of Nature into the history of 20th-century art. (Cf. the book Joseph Beuys, Zurich 1996.) In this particular context | wish to call to the mind of the reader an historical flashback: in 1993, at the request of Joseph Beuys | was present at the Kunsthaus of Zurich, a place of which he was very fond, primarily for the supportive collaboration of Harald Szeemann who donated the sublime work Olivestone to one of the most significant musems of Europe. My thoughts of eternal gratitude are also directed toward the family Szeemann: Ingeborg and Una, who in moments of my most ex treme suffering have conveyed to me that sagacious energy which bears with it the meaning of life. Yesterday as today it is to Love of the Truth which shines on the pages of Mankind's History, produces the Evolution of Society, and marks the grand Chapters of Humanity. Lucrezia De Domizio Bolognano, November 2, 2002, day of the anniversary of the death of Pier Paolo Pasolini Note

After thirty-two years (1979-2011) Grassello Ca (OH), + H,O is the only remainig work of Beuys's Defence of Nature operation present in an Italian museum

430

x

Ù

Gabriella Belli

Testimony Grassello Ca (OH), + H,O

following pages Joseph Beuys, Grassello Ca (OH), + H,O Defence of Nature, 1979-1980, permanent installation, Rovereto, Mart, December 14, 2002

Ever since the start of the construction of the new Mart Museum in Rovereto it was my wish that an important work by the German artist Joseph Beuys should become part of the Permanent Collection. About three years ago, | met Baronessa Lucrezia De Domizio Durini in Milan, | spoke to her at length about my project and found her to be immediately ready to help. | visited her collection at her home in Bolognano and we began to collaborate in the sign of Joseph Beuys. On October 13, 2001, at the Palazzo delle Albere in Trento, the Mart Museum promoted the exhibition “Joseph Beuys. L'immagine dell'Umanità,” we published the book of the same name and a confer ence was organized with eminent Italian and foreign personages who had also assisted with the compilation of the book. When, in May of 2001, | visited the baroness's collection, of all the many works by the German artist, | was particularly attracted by the work Grassello, not only by its formal beauty, but for the account of the Viaggio (Journey) with the relative cultural implications contained in the work. On my journey from Bolognano to Trento | perceived the importance of the presence of the work Grassello in the new Museum in Rover eto. Historical personages of German culture who crossed our territory came to my mind and | saw in Grassello the work by the German artist which, after having taken a round-trip out-return-returnout-return, would find a safe and rightful home in our museum. The work Grassello is the sum of all Joseph Beuys's spiritual thought. In it act all the experiences of the operation Defence of Nature, which took place in Abruzzo in the last thirteen years of the Artist's life in constant collaboration with Lucrezia De Domizio and Buby Durini, and in it interact all those intrinsic components which belong to the artist and to the work: the Italian territory, the alchemy of the encounter, the journey, collaboration, the naturalness of creative processes... It is with great pride that the new Mart Museum in Rovereto has acquired the regal work Grassello by Joseph Beuys. This work by the German artist is now an integral work of the permanent collection partly thanks to the jointly responsible generosity of Baronessa Lucrezia De Domizio, who has desired to donate part of the work in memory of her deceased husband Barone Giuseppe Durini. Grassello is a work which will serve as a stimulus to all those who see in Beuysian thought and art a cultural, social and economic revival for the whole of humanity. Gabriella Belli, Mart director

(From L. De Domizio, A. d'Avossa, Grassello Ca (OH), + H,O, Mart — Silvana Editoriale, 2002)

431

An Invitation on a Journey: Grassello Drawn from a conversation between Pierparide Tedeschi

Lucrezia De Domizio,

Buby Durini and

Pierparide Tedeschi: “In Grassello one sees the indissoluble conjunction of art and life, of nature and man. It is practically a full realization of one of the dreams of German Romanticism..." Lucrezia De Domizio: Over the period 1930-40 Joseph Beuys was open to a number of intellectual stimuli, from the work of such figures as Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, Wagner and Satie. The literary debate between the Romantic and the Classical would be of special importance for him: he was profoundly interested in Goethe, Schiller, Hòlderlin and Novalis, in the visual inventions explored by Edvard Munch, the themes developed by Hamsun and the whole range of Scandinavian literature. He also had a great love for the work of James Joyce, to the point that in the years 1958-61 he added two chapters of sketches to Ulysses. And one of the figures who undoubtedly had the greatest influence upon the artist's ideas was Rudolf Steiner, the founder of Anthroposophy. His friend Fritz Rolf Rothemburg, who died in the Sachsenhausen concentration camp, was the first to recommend he read Steiner's works: The Philosophy of Freedom, The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity, Occult Science: A Summary. But it was only after the war that Beuys would return to these books, managing to read them with new eyes. A war veteran, Beuys was also recover ing from the disappointment he had been caused by the rigidity and academicism that reigned in the world of science, his first love. It was then that he decided to dedicate himself to art. PT.: Did the reading of Steiner provide stimuli that would remain an influence throughout all his future work? L.D.D.: Beuys shared Steiner's belief that our attitude towards reality should be not based exclusively upon rationality; it should also— indeed, above all—be spiritual. In fact, if humankind imposes limits upon its faculties of perception, it lessens the spiritual wealth that one can derive from a wider understanding of reality. Beuys would always begin any discussion of politics with the question: “What reality are we talking about?” VVhen we observe reality, we realize that Nature is an inexhaustible source of information, on every level. This is clear in Steiner, when he talks about the work of bees or about quartz crystals. And it is also clear in Beuys, when he makes natural substances the co-protagonists (together with himself) of his works of art; in the specific case of Grassello, those substances are water and lime. Beuys considered that the theoretical models one chooses to adopt should not however be raised to the level of absolute truths or dogmas that had to be followed absolutely. 434

PT: Beuys draws upon all the teachings of German Romanticism, but he has a very concrete, more realist, approach. Above all, he does not simply want to return to the past. L.D.D.: Beuys looks to the future and sees within it the chance for humankind to re-conquer its anthropological unity. As for science, it is logical that this is not, in itself, a threat or danger. It is only when there is an arbitrary or restricted notion of science that it can become dangerous. Unfortunately, this is what has happened—and not only in science but in almost all other sectors, including art. For Beuys, the only way out is an organic mode of praxis. This process of transformation, of evolutionary development, would broaden and open up the various cognitive systems that are now part of our Western mentality. It is very important to underline that the Romantic poets' nostalgic approach to Nature—their yearning for a past harmony that once existed between humankind and the natural world—is totally alien to Beuys's thought. He prefers the present—if for no other reason than the fact that he lives there. And the present is at the service of the future. By his example, Beuys taught us to commit ourselves so that the future life of humankind will be better. However, this commitment is not to be understood as a process predicated upon pragmatic concerns. Ve should not forget the essential need to widen the entire range of creative potential that exists in human thought, feeling and will. But there is more. When Beuys talks of “the bonds of love” and “spiritual affinities"—vwhich are not to understood as that which provides the basis for primitive cultures—he is saying that in the society of the future, love alone should be the sole perquisite; it should determine the relations between man and his fellow humankind and between man and nature. One can understand, therefore, why there is such total involvement of the artist in everything he does, everything he creates. In Grassello one finds the symbolic traces of all this. Travel, image, the public and the private, creative freedom and pure material, design and project, science and desire, the course of time and expectation—all go together with photography to construct a homogeneous architecture of form, in which each individual gesture, each material, reflects and contains the totality of thought. In this way, the “object” of art is rehabilitated. Through a deep and secret Metamorphosis, it becomes a “work” of art—thus offering itself as an expression of the Credo of human energy. PT.: What did the whole Grassello project mean for you and Buby Durini? L.D.D.: The Grassello project, ranging from Pescara to Dùsseldorf, began in 1978—when Beuys asked us for some pure lime to whitewash his house-studio in Dùsseldorf—and it came to an end in 1979-80. It was a complex and organic work which can be seen in 435

relation to the Defence of Nature, itself a work-in-progress which

had begun with the Aratura Biologica in Pescara (December 1976) and would then continue on the land that Buby Durini owned at San Silvestro Colli. AII of the works that were part of Defence of Nature came under the aegis of the FI.U. (Free International University), one of whose premises was in Pescara (Via delle Caserme 16). The whole Defence of Nature operation is not to be seen in solely ecological terms. It is essentially centred upon humankind, upon the defence of humanity, of creativity and human values. In this sense, when one talks about ecology in the work of Beuys, one has to be very careful. Beuys was not a “Green” who simplistically rejected all that is Modern, all that is the fruit of technological progress, as “evil” However, he did see that humankind should not limit its evolutionary potential to industrial and technological development. Humankind should use its creative energies for “therapeutic work" on behalf of Nature. The Grassello operation was thus a concrete undertaking; involving complex collaboration and solidarity of purpose, it was an expression of constant commitment, arising from a profound understanding with the ideas of the artist. Joseph Beuys devised the ideas behind the operation, Buby Durini and myself were the “operative” force behind it. Joseph Beuys's true intention was to restore humankind's awareness of its own means—that is, its ability to work as a true artist on “invisible materials” (ideas and words) and so construct a new world.

P.T.: What traces did Beuys leave of the Grassello operation? L.D.D.: He left two important traces. The first is the public document, which is the expression of a detailed formulation of exposition. Reflecting the complexity of the entire analytical process behind the work of art, this is its Credo, its dogma. The second trace is more significant because it concerns all those stimuli that enrich the deepest dynamics at work within our being. The sacramental placing of his Grasse/lo within the drain of the courtyard of the Casa Sapienzale was also the sacramental offering of his praxis as an artist. It was a private moment in which to assess one's own existence—a moment that played upon the dialectic between emotions, needs and ones real raison d’étre. This act of conservation/preservation, which aimed to impinge upon our difficult strivings towards gratification, was a valuable exploration of personal abilities. It was a moment of neutrality and abstinence, and of maintenance of that Which is; it opened the way to self-analysis. In such a dialogue with ourselves there is always the chance of re-establishing the correct distance and syntony in the relation between the outside world and our inner life. The gesture of preserving becomes an act of defence, or proactive protection. The drain, the hole in the earth, becomes a maternal vwomb filled with fecund seed. Here we have the constant simula436

tion of birth and life, closely combined in profound creative intimacy. Beuys enacts the great secret that opens the way to resurrection and reincarnation. In effect, this is an idealized settlement raised upon the already-existing traces of a constant rebuilding of the world. And the startingpoint is always the individual, the true therapeuta, who is in tune with the forces of nature and aware of his own capacities. In this total all-embracing participation, each action becomes an opportunity for reproduction, thus re-establishing the primary tension of lived experience. PT. Andas a work?

L.D.D.: This operation embraced all the resonances within the system of art, involving examples of the various ways in which art “represents. There is sculpture, drawing, graphics and photography; there is a book, a multiple, a poster, a postcard, a video. All of these are traces of memory that reflect an enlightening and vital experience. | will now give a brief description of the thirty-five images that recount the journey of these three hundred quintals of Grassello lime, which were shipped in an articulated lorry from Pescara and, after various vicissitudes at customs offices, arrived in Dusseldorf to be used in whitewashing Beuys's house and studio. The book opens with a “didactic"” drawing by the artist, with the scientific formula presenting the content of chemical analysis. The first to fifth image: the preparation for transportation, the overall ordering of the journey itself. The sixth to ninth image: the journey begins, and one sees the bureaucratic aspect of human nature. The tenth and eleventh image: the arrival. The twelfth image: the old house ready for restoration. The thirteenth to eighteenth image: the work of collaboration. The nineteenth image: action. The twentieth image: payment. The twenty-first image: the artist, his family, studio and a friend. The twenty-second image: a gaze. The twenty-third image: sacks of lime, trade-name “Grassello.” The twenty-fourth to twenty-sixth image: the return journey. The twenty-seven and twenty-eighth image: Beuys with his assistants.

The twenty-ninth image: the graphics. The thirtieth image: the document. The thirty-first image: the whitewashed house a year later. The thirty-second image: the Grassello in the drain. The thirty- third image: the manhole cover in the courtyard. The thirty-fourth image: the small crate (43 x 64 x 44 cm) with a sack of Grassello and a book (work exhibited on October 10, 1981 at the Yvon Lambert Gallery in Paris). The thirty-fifth image: Beuys at Bolognano speaking on TV about the 437

sculpture Grassello (wooden cage, measuring 92 x 102 x 110 cm containing six sacks of lime and ten books).Work exhibited as part of the exhibition “Viaggi in Italia” held at the Pinacoteca di Ravenna on July 9, 1988. In this all-embracing, organic, course of development emerges the work of art.

PT.: The publication first appeared in 1979, comprising images alone. Then in 1990, about five years after Beuys's death, it was republished with reflections that enable the reader to have a fuller and deeper vision of the German master's work.

L.D.D.: As you will have noticed on other occasions, every time | have a publishing opportunity | try to respect and reflect two concepts that are fundamental in Beuys's thought: “reconstruction” and “creative freedom.” Both of these lead to a widening—an ex pansion—of human energies and to a knowledge of the truth. PT.: Grassello is also a document illustrated with an extraordinary sequence of photographs by Buby Durini, who for around twenty years now has been recording in photographs key events in the history of contemporary art.

Buby Durini: | have been following my wife, Lucrezia De Domizio, in this since 1971, and | entirely share her cultural priorities. As is well-known, my house at San Silvestro in Abruzzo has played host to many of the most important figures in international contemporary art. Thus | have had the chance to put together a precious photographic archive—one of the most curious such collections of the past twenty years. | will confess, however, that | am not really interested in the works of art or in the artists; what stimulates me to do things is the human relationship that is spontaneously established between different people. Those people must work together to develop the energies that might be employed in understanding, collaboration, solidarity. They must strive for acts and actions that are inspired by notions of primary importance for humanity, for our life and culture. | have many memories of moments of both great tension and warm and respectful friendship with numerous artists. Amongst others, | remember Marco Bagnoli (with his // buon luogo), Sandro Chia (with Graziosa Girevole), Giuseppe Chiari, Carlo Ciarli, Gino De Dominicis (with his work on animals), Enrico Job, Jannis Kounellis, Mario Merz, Luigi Ontani, Gina Pane, Michelangelo Pistoletto (With his Anno 1), Remo Salvadori and Ettore Spalletti. PT.: What can you tell us about your great friendship with Beuys? About your important photographic work with him? About the commitment to ideas and reciprocal respect that existed between you? B.D.: Joseph Beuys has a very special place in my memory. From Our very first meeting—on the ferry to Capri in September 1971 or 72, | am 438

not sure—there

was a complex mix of shared emotions

and awareness between us, which would only be understandable to those who are imbued with both a scientific outlook and humanist culture. For me, taking photographs means understanding, or attempting to understand, something. In taking a photograph, | feel as though | am drawing near to the artist's ideas and thought without losing any of my own personality. | cannot photograph something unless | am communicating a concept, an idea—vwhich do not necessarily have to be "aesthetic‘ PT.: The experience of the Grassello project lasted for about a year, to what events do the final images bear witness? B.D.: | experienced some magical and unrepeatable moments in Beuys's company. We spoke a language that ranged over various social and scientific concerns. In part, our concern was a specific zone of productive and creative abilities; in part, it ranged over all levels of human expression. | will always remember the twentyfive days | spent with Beuys at the Guggenheim Museum in New York in October 1979, when he wanted me to photograph him day and night, in public and in private... This would lead to the creation of two splendid works that are now part of our collection. And the whole Defence of Nature operation, which lasted around ten years, bears witness to an overall—organic—development of ideas and praxis, with presence within the work itself becoming the essence of a conception of the world. | think that, when approached in this manner, photography does much more than record something, than provide information; it establishes a zone of desire and truth. Perception itself becomes an expression of sense; the image is a communication of real thought. The thirty-five photographs of Grassello are not a record of the event; they are the event. They represent an authentic impulse to compose and de-compose vital components in order to generate new stimuli; the photographic image embodies the evolution of thought and ideas. One of the greatest figures in the world of contemporary art, Joseph Beuys liked being photographed. In my opinion, he turned the photographic image into the very truth of his own thought, the reality of his aktionen. PT.: One can see a certain community of feeling between Beuys's Grassello and films by Wim Wenders—such as Alice in den Stadten, Falsche Bewegung and Im Lauf der Zeit—which offer a new and unconventional exploration of the theme of travel, which is so dear to German culture. Grassello is an event and itinerary. Beuys carries out a sort of reverse “Journey in Italy," just as Wenders illustrates a sort of reverse “journey of self-formation. There are clear refer ences to Goethe's Italian Journey and Wilhelm Meister. Grassello is also an exploration of lost time and memory, with a sort of Wagnerian fascination.

L.D.D.: We know how much Beuys loved music; as a boy he studied piano and cello. Between 1962 and 1965 he was part of Fluxus, an 439

international movement that drew together people from various disciplines: journalists, sculptors, musicians and philosophers. Participation in this movement was very important for Beuys because it gave him the opportunity to work through his own ideas for a wider public; it brought him into contact with people who were working to break down the divisions between art and life, who pur sued the goal of interdisciplinary communication.Vvhilst on the one hand Beuys sympathised with the Fluxus notion that art should not be restricted to artists, he would ultimately realise that this goal was not being pursued in a fully articulate manner; he felt the need to widen the concepts involved, in order to embrace technology and politics. One should also point out that Beuys was decidedly against the Dadaist provocations that were part of Fluxus. He was not interested in provocation as an end in itself, without any innovative content. For Beuys, provocations should be an input of energy, something that would open up and widen the outlook of an excessively blinkered consciousness; they should serve to make the unconscious part of experience, to turn indifference into inter est. What appealed to him most about Fluxus was the music, even if understood in a far from conventional sense. Note The first publication, commissioned by Beuys, was issued by the DIAC of Pescara in 1979 and contained only photographic images. The work Grassello was presented at the Rome Palazzo delle Esposizioni on June 15, 1991, with a publication of the same name by Carte Segrete

Rdizioni CARTE SEGRETE

440

The “Viaggi del Grassello PescaraDUsseldorf-Pescara 1979-1980" and related

publications by Lucrezia De Domizio

FOURTH Waldo

READING

Bien, EI.U. Amsterdam

Why Joseph Beuys shaved me EI.U. research project Raum 20 Waldo Bien in conversation with Burkhard Rosskothen, einfallsreich.tv, Venezia 2007.waldobien.com/fiuamsterdam.com/fiuwac.com

Beuys shaved me in Centre Pompidou in Paris on the first of January 1984 during the Life satellite TV programme “Bonjour Mr. Orwell” orchestrated by Nam June Paik: art for 25 million people. It was, as far as | know, the first satelliteTV art performance. The shaving had to do with the following: In 1970 | became a student of Beuys in his Raum 20 class at the Dusseldorf Academy. After Beuys in 1972 had been fired by the Ministry of Education for the well known political reasons, a small hard core group of students, among whom myself, kept the Beuys Class alive as long as possible, till 1976. We continued our inter disciplinary research as Academy with the right to self-government (Akademie mit dem Recht auf Selbstverwaltung) and that's what we did. Contact with Beuys would take place outside the academy. The spirit of FI.U. comes out of this specific situation. After | left the Academy | shared a studio with my student/colleague Michael Rutkowsky, whose independent artistic research Beuys highly At the same time | also had a gallery at the Luegallee in Dùsseldorf Oberkassel. Beuys however was of the opinion that | should give that up and become active as a public artist. Every time he passed by he knocked on the window and asked “when | would start!” He considered the framework of my activity as too limited. The question in what kind of frame something happens or is presented to the world is a basic question. In sculpture it's a pedestal question, a question of finding the right pedestal. The pedestal for our product as a human being/artist we are ourselves. You have to work on yourself because you are a pedestal and it must be in tune. This became clear to me one day while | was shaving myself. 1980 | left Dusseldorf and moved to Amsterdam to continue my artistic interdisciplinary research in splendid isolation in my studio as | did before. In January 1983 | started a 365 days shaving project on board of a ship with the name Regal Star that was moored in the Amsterdam harbour several years because it was too big to find cargo. One day a friend and | had passed by with our boat, just like we do now here in Venice, and we saw a little rowing boat with two sailors in panic. A passing ship had swamped a wave into their boat and they couldn't swim which is not unusual for sailors. We than tugged them back to there ship, the Regal Star, coming from Piraeus. The Greek captain showed me around. When he opened one of the giant and empty cargo holds, Nr 5, | realized that this was the right location to work undisturbed on my shaving Project. The cap441

Waldo Bien AMSTERDAM Waldo Bien

- F.I..U.

Amsterdam

in conversation with Burkhard Rosskothen cinfalbirmchi tv.Venice 2007 waldobien.comTiuamsterdam.comWfluwac.com

“Why Joseph Beuys shaved me”, Bauys shaved me in Centre Pompidou in Puris onthe firsiof January 1964 during the Lilesateiito TV program Bonjour Mr Ore

orcagioaG byMa JunePaliantfor25 million peopie. It was, 2 faras| know, ihefritsatelito TVartperformance. Theshaving had o 40 with the following.

REGAL

STAR

joseph

6;

PROJECT

In 19701 became a studont o!Beuys inhsRaum 20 cluss atthoDissoidori Academy. Ater Beuys in1972 had been fred bytha Minstry ofEducationlorho well Lagumpolitical resone, + small hard core group of siudenta, among whom myself, kopt the Bauys Class alive dm unti1976. Thw pintofFU and conteued cu iniordsciplinary resarch #3Academy with honightioselfgovernment longaspossible comos out ofhis spocitio situato Altec1lofttheAcademy|shared astudio withmy siudonticolluagua Micheal Rutkowsky whose independent artsticreswarch Beuys high valuad. Altha same lime | also had a gallery atfe Luegaltce = Dasseldort Oberkassol Beuys however wa ofte opinion that| stori

Beuys

| dd GOSEHEDCDA

pe Pa IF

dr

Reicra pepiptapefrizLe

give thaiUpandbacorne acive asa public arisi Every Ume he passed by he inocked onthe window and asted When |would star. He

È

]

and Amstentarm o cip arduo articipinaoy rosea spienig sotaton January 1983 | startod3365 days stuning Projeci on hard ofhe ship si Regal Star that was moored 1 the Amsttstam Ranbou: because 4 was 100 bigtofind cargo One day 2 trend and | had esesd by vaicurLosiendvesesraiorowing boot wifi io sailor n pui Ai passing sVGbasswampec awave into ter boat and they could] sim. We lugged them back toiheirship, theRegal Star, from Piraeus. The captain showed me around. When he opened i8

©.

seg himlocome pubibcartst. Afow weeksDeforeBeuys phoned toistmenow that hehad a better idea: Neo. come toPars, | want todoit inParis”. Beuys insstedon doing ite Paris, inCentre Pompidou, onthefirstofJanuary 1984, 1 hisdomain. Theciclo wouid becpened and the question answerod by the er veni sel petrino

ansa per e The shaving in Paris was the hour of birth ofmy FU,

Amsterdam activity. To datinguish one from the other. Bauys shaved mo twice. each time using a new blade. The Paris shaving

>

n

‘e management around he vers

oa Lxwww waldoben com (ArtWorks > Sculpture > Regal Star)

tain who liked the idea of being visited each day generously offered me to work there. In the centre of the space | dumped the question I wanted to work on and placed a special shaving table that | had sculpted according to my anthropological self-research. On a daily basis | than visited the ship with my boat to shave me there. The shaving debris | than saved between two 10 x 10 cm glass plates and this was placed on the floor and would, in 365 days, create a circle. Circles, something one should realise, are regressive, focused on their centre. To get out one has to break the circle. Beuys was informed about my self-research on board of the Regal Star and | had shown him a video registration by Martijn van Haalen during one of my visits to his studio Drakeplatz. Autumn 1983 | asked him to come to Amsterdam on the last day of the project and shave. | would answer the question in regard to becoming a public artist. A few weeks before Beuys phoned to let me know that he had a better idea: Nee, come to Paris, | want to do it in Paris. Beuys insisted on doing it in Paris, in Centre Pompidou, on the first of January 1984, in his domain. The circle would be opened and the question would be answered by the event itself. Beuys had already anticipated my answer. The shaving in Paris was the hour of birth of my 442

FI.U. Amsterdam activity. To distinguish one from the other, Beuys shaved me twice, each time using a new blade. The Paris shaving object Beuys left as a present to me. Since that day | represent, on the initiative of Beuys himself, the FI.U. Amsterdam, together with artists friends from Holland, Ireland, Germany, Denmark, France and the U.S.A. in a FI.U. open framework, among who are several former Beuys's students. In 1999 we founded, on my initiative and with the help of the “green” Triodos Bank, the FIUVVAC, the Free International University World Art Collection, a social sculpture project in progress, and declared it as ownership of the world population. Walter Hopps, the founding Director of The Menil in Houston/Guggenheim N.Y. offered to become FIUWAC Advisory Board Director. The Triodos Bank has committed itself to be Host and Partner for the FIUWVAC collection and to set up a FIUVWAC Foundation to protect/ safeguard and further develop the collection. We are, in 2007, still waiting for this to become true. Together with my artist/friend Jacobus Kloppenburg | have developed the FI.U. Board and Conference Table Toolkit to assist with global well-being and responsible management around the world. In Bolognano, invited by Lucrezia De Domizio, representative of Italian F1.U., during the Third Free International Forum,. 20-26 May 2008, with all of my FI.U. friends we took part and worked together for six days through Installations, Conferences, Performances, Music, Videos. We created the Vetrina Notturna El.U. and brought three big Basalt stones placing one of them in Palazzo Durini at the entrance under Beuys's giant poster “Defence of Nature”; we put the second stone under the First Oak planted in Italy by Beuys on May 13, 1984 in front of his atelier in Piantagione Paradise, and the third one near the “oak” planted by Lucrezia De Domizio in Memory of Joseph Beuys's eightieth anniversary. All of us from EI.U. recall Bolognano as the German Master town par excellence. (from Risk, no. 27 May 2008)

FIFTH READING Dhemosthenes Davvetas

Joseph Beuys. Man is Sculpture Joseph Beuys was born on May 12, 1922 in Krefeld from "a wound drawn together with a plaster”; a phrase he himself uses in his autobiographical notes. Who could imagine that this child was destined in the world of contemporary art, to become the exemplary artist incarnate in whose work the idea of the “wound"” (or Wunde in German, a word close to Wunder, miracle) would play a principal role? During the Second World War, Joseph Beuys (again by his own account), whose ambition was to become a doctor, found himself in the Luftwaffe at the age of 18 as a bombardier. He had such traumatic memories—his plane crash, the death of many of his own friends and imprisonment by the Allies—that he gave up the idea of studying medicine. His life from then on was haunted by nightmares and plagued by feelings of guilt and anguished questions about the future of Man and Mankind. Just as Joe Bousquet, who had himself been physically injured in the previous war, had tried to come to terms with his injury by turning towards writing and poetry, so Beuys turned toward art. In 1944, he enrolled in the class of Ewald Mataré, a teacher of the Academy of Fine Art in Dusseldorf. Beuys shares with Bousquet the sense that an injury is above all a moral trauma. The theme of injury would remain “radioactive” in Beuys's work until his death, becoming a fundamental component of his artistic language. This theme does not weigh down on the past, but, as with Bousquet, is at the origin of a penetrating analysis by the great German artist on the life and destiny of Man in general: Man is therefore at the centre of the work; he is the sculpture; a sculpture gifted with thought, sensitivity and will. To thought would devolve the inquiry on traumatism: What is it? Where is it? What are its consequences? In short, it becomes an investigative task. To sensitivity would return therapeutic activity: how to heal or dare to heal and see the process of healing. As for will, its task would be to inscribe this endeavour into an historical perspective. Beuys's drawings, his sculptures, his performances, his writing, his political action—everything in his work demands the presence of an anthropological constituent, a constant which conceals creative strength, energy, knowing nature and the will to change it on the condition that Man understands that he is the master of his material and of the possibilities opened up by science. Thus, with the key that is formed by this anthropocentrism, it becomes easier, as we make our way through a series of works, to interpret compositions such as Fat Corners and Fat Chair, How to Explain Pictures to a Dead Hare,

And in us ... under us ... landunder, Celtic, Coyote and Tram Stop. 444

A Decisive Stage: Fluxus The determining phase in Beuys's work occurred around 1960, when the controversy around Fluxus began. The title is derived from the famous concept of “panta rei”: “Into the same river we both step and do not step. We both are and are not” (Heraclitus, Fragments). Fluxus represents a sort of continuation of the ironic uprisings and methods in art matter begun by Yves Klein and Manzoni—the extension of an American style Happening. However, Fluxus differs on a fundamental point: during a Happening what occurs is reinforced and amplified by the participation of the audience, whereas in Fluxus we can see that there is a tendency to establish, without its formal exclusion, a disciplined relationship with the audience which prevents the “ceremonial” progression from turning into chaos. Fluxus aimed to bring together musicians, dancers, painters, poets, sculptors and all other types of artists into an anti-egocentric, anti-nationalist and anonymous platform as a melting pot of different nationalities and viewpoints. Like the demonstrations of its predecessor, Dada, Fluxus aimed at releasing the individual from any type of physical and intellectual and, in particular, political repression. The fact that Fluxus neither set up any discrimination between artistic disciplines nor burdened the multiple space of art with artificial barriers was natural; having both a revolutionary and antiauthoritarian character, Fluxus refused to separate art and life. It assumed John Cage's viewpoint that everyday life can be seen as theatre wherein everything can coexist. The obsolete idea of artistic specialization gives way to the common ground of communication where, inevitably, everything is oriented towards the power of the image, the action, the performance—towards a superior output of mediatory possibilities. In trying to go beyond the strict limits of painting or sculpture and of the national and geographical frontiers of art, Fluxus gives value to the mobility of materials and is akin to the old dream ofTotal Art. Any material, no matter what sort and even the most humble, can contribute to the combined, entire idea—the global concept. Anyone can be associated with these actions since, being an open, outward movement, it does not allow for ideological enclosure. Rivalling Marcel Duchamp, Beuys is more inclined towards energy and artistic effect, rather than the final product, the work of art. Fat — Felt

Next came the moment when materials such as fat and felt made their appearance. Both the technical and speculative aspects of Beuys's views on sculpture coexisted within these materials. The moment took place in 1964, on the occasion of a reading given by Allan Kaprow at the Zwirner Gallery in Cologne. The works of this period such as Fat Corners and Fat Chair display his “theory of sculpture"—from the indefinite to the defined, from 445

heat (the “chaotic”) to cold (the “crystallised”), from the spontaneous (the “formless”) to the intellectualized (the “formed”). The transition was not made just in one stage but was the result of a progression, which Beuys has described himself:

My initial intention in using fat was to stimulate discussion. The flex ibility of the material appealed to me particularly in its reactions to temperature changes. This flexibility is psychologically effective— people instinctively feel it relates to inner processes and feelings. The discussion | wanted was about the potential of sculpture and culture, what they mean, what language is about, what human production and creativity are about. So | took an extreme position in sculpture, and a material that was very basic to life and not associated with art. At this time, although | had not exhibited, the students and artists who saw this piece did have some curious reactions which confirmed my feelings about the effect of placing fat in a cor ner. People started to laugh, get angry, or try to destroy it. The fat on the “Fat Chair" is not geometric, as in the “Fat Corners," but keeps something of its chaotic character. The ends of the wedges read like a cross-section cut through the nature of fat. | placed it on a chair to emphasize this, since here the chair represents a kind of human anatomy, the area of digestive and excretive warmth processes, sexual organs and interesting chemical change, relating psychologically to will power. In German the joke is compounded as a pun since “Stuhl” (chair) is also the polite way of saying shit (stool), and that top is a used and mineralised material with chaotic character, reflected in the texture of the cross-section of fat. The importance and consequences of Fat Chair and Fat Corners were recognized by Beuys: Now, 15 years later | can say that without Fat Chair and the Fat Corners as vehicles none of my activities would have had such an effect. It started an almost chemical process among people that would have been impossible if | had only spoken theoretically.

Interrogations Concerning the Role of the Audience From now on Beuys's beginnings took a more insistent turn: everything indicated that his temperament would draw his course towards its most extreme limits and that it would not remain fixed. For him the world was not fragmented but whole. Equally, his art created conflicting forces that both created and destroyed in the same instant. Beuys was certain that such a route would, in a chain of events, pass through situations that were not always pleasant. It is precisely there that the artist's strength is revealed: in the deepseated resourcefullness which allows him to turn every experience to the advantage of his creative development, and Beuys showed that he possessed that strength many times. One of the most typical examples was at the Festival of New Art, held at Aix-la-Chapelle in 1964, where, with other artists, he took part in various actions entitled Kukei, Akopee No!, Brown Cross, and Fat Corners. However, at the time of the third stage of the programme planned for the Fes446

tival that dealt with word, image and sound, the performance had to be stopped because of the booing from the audience and one of the students punching Beuys in the face. Beuys remained unperturbed and did not renounce his standpoint despite the riot. These events, as well as his participation a month earlier at Documenta Ill (where he presented drawings and sculptures from the period 1951-56 including Queen Bee /-/Il), played an essential role in what was to follow. Firstly, because his thinking began to be ‘infiltrated’” by the political factor, and moreover, in an imperative way. Secondly, because he began to consider the creator/community relationship of his actions from a different angle and preferred to put himself in a less vulnerable position in relation to the public. It should be stressed that the first ideas, which had been the initial theoretical substratum of Fluxus, on the “collective mind/ “anonymity" and the role of the audience in general, paved the way for a new critical phase marked by a change in speculative foundations. Beuys didn't find himself particularly in favour of the tumult and agitation, or the spectators' propensity for destroying certain performances. Nor did he feel the need to continue being left to the exclusive domination of chance during an action. To the contrary, he was looking for a concentration of a different nature to what presides over the ordinary control of Time: meditation, the control of material and space, dialogue with the audience. This kind of attitude, however, should not be analysed as an absolute inclination to control everything with no account of invisible parameters, surprise, the unforeseen, which can all interfere with the more or less lasting development of the action. Rather, it must simply be seen from the point of view of a ritual. An open ritual which can then provoke a series of questions, the equivalent of a method which once again would include in its project an awakening of the forces of the mind. This is why Beuys from now on would place the creator further in the background in the course of his subsequent performances, rendering him more obscure in his relationship with the audience, yet without meaning that communication with the community would be cut off. It was merely another form of dialogue, which he would set up in the ritual of the following works. Parallel Creation

The effect of Fluxus, even in the most grandiose and decisive moments of its progress and display, is characterized by a certain determining antithesis that has marked the whole of Beuys's lan-

guage. On the one hand, there exists an unreserved investiture of oneself, in the “spirit” of a revolutionary use of new materials for artistic expression and, as a consequence, a radical refusal of the image of the artist as an antisocial and marginal genius locked in his studio.

On the other hand, however, can be seen the persistent, unwaver ing determination never to become integrated with groups, organi sations or Movements. While confident in the journey he had begun, a journey similar to that of an explorer who investigates every region of human expression hitherto unknown, forbidden or impenetrable to art, Beuys had only explored a part of himself in Fluxus. The other part was reserved for the freedom of a continuing personal creation. Besides, he was still an outsider, an observer and a protagonist. He was someone who knew how to delve deep into the spirit of the time, not so as to show it in the heart of a form of reality, but, above all, to transform it into a further element of the thought, which, in having a total expression, propelled his artistic language to the furthest depths of humanity's memory.

Time-Space Beuys has always used Time as well as Space in a particular way. In Beuys's own language, Time and Space as weapons against the materialism of everyday life, its bad organization and stereotyped production, or as a way of remembering the existence of human dignity, take on different dimensions from their usual ones: they become the field of action of his proposition: supreme Man, the administrator of his production capacities. We can see an example of this way of perceiving things in And in us ... beneath us ... landunder, an action that took place in June 1965 at the Parnass Gallery in Wuppertal. During this happening which lasted 24 hours—from midnight to midnight—Beuys, who was curled up in a chair, from time to time would shake his feet and head over a tub full of margarine or would, occasionally, with his ear against a carton, listen to the fat with which the carton was filled. Then he tried to touch the objects that were out of his reach without sliding off his box. Before curling up again, he started a cassette recorder and with a concentrated expression let his head go back to the carton of fat to carry on listening once again. On occasion, he would take hold of one of the two builders' shovels that were left standing against a blackboard and grip it close to its chest. In this action,it is not the materials which represent the centre of gravity (moreover, some of them, such as the margarine, tape recorder and fat had previously been used) but the anthropocentric factor which, explained in this rather absurd, irritating way, leads to the idea that Time and Space are not exteriorised or far away from Man, but within him in all his possibilities. It suffices to have the will power to attempt an approach to things which seem to be beyond likely limits, so we reach a stage of continual dispute with ourselves and thus of strengthened conscience. 448

Spiritual Dimension It is natural that this proposition which dominated Beuys's intellectual problematic necessitated new sources of energy. It was vigor ously taken up in different forms inherent in the cyclical process of his “alphabet"” since the scheme of traditional thought seemed to him to be exhausted. Indeed, the law of one permanent “rational” system was not enough for him: he needed something else, something capable of provoking an awakening of the mind in the form of spiritual relaxation that would reinvigorate the intellect with new strength. It is through the perspective of necessary resources of Man's spiritual energies that ve must consider his next action in 1965 at the Schmela Gallery in Dusseldorf: How to Explain Pictures to a Dead Hare. It went thus: the exhibition hall remained closed to the public who could only see what was happening inside, either through the gallery window or on a screen. Inside, Beuys had put together the following objects, some of which are familiar to us: a stool with one foot wrapped in a sheath of felt, and two bones placed just beside him in which were hidden microphones. Beuys, his head smeared with honey and gold leaf, held a dead hare in his arms, which he carried from one picture to another. The shoes he was wearing had two different soles: one of iron (concealing a microphone) and the other of felt. He sat on the stool and begun to murmur in an almost incomprehensible way, explaining painting to the hare and deliberately refusing to address the audience. Here we find ourselves once again confronted with a metaphor of the artist who invents a ritual through visual representation of his own code. The hare isn't there to suggest the death of art—a point which many have misinterpreted; on the contrary, linked to the ancient goddess Mother Earth, the hare is a symbol of regeneration and underground incarnation; it becomes the power whose aim is to arouse the dormant ratio—reason. Felt (whose qualities as a preserving and protective agent are already familiar); gold—leaf or powder— (which has its cultural value); iron (a metal linked to energy); the microphones (transmitting the voice, which is not only for Beuys the vehicle of the message, but also, by its very existence, a sculptural material with an energising value); honey (by origin, the rise of the vegetable towards the animal and an energising substance which connotes a perfectly structured community): so many elements are used here by Beuys not as an attempt to propose an aesthetic motion but as the wheels of the mechanism of his thought that is guided by a desire: that of drawing out “dead” intellect from its lethargy (the reason for which Beuys “honeyed” his head) and—organically uniting thought, action (praxis), matter and form—achieving Creation. In hexagonal and crystalline wax sculptures, honey—that ener gising and moving substance —is cast by the bee community. Similarly, Beuys intends to introduce into the structures of reason, movement, plasticity and warmth—essential materials in his 449

theory of sculpture which flow into social and political concepts: The nature of warmth is latent in honey, wax, and even in pollen and nectar taken from plants. In mythology, honey was considered a spiritual substance and bees were divine. The cult of the bee is fundamentally a cult to Venus... It had spread widely and was influenced by all the process of the production of honey, a link between the earthly and the divine. The flow of a substance stemming from all the environment—plants, minerals and the sun—was the essence of the bee cult. The allusion refers to socialism, as it was practised in the large clock and watch making cooperatives of the Republic of Bes at La Chaux-de-Fonds (Switzerland). We can still see sculpted bees, the symbols of socialism, on the walls and stone foundations. This doesn't imply State socialism that functions like a machine but a socialist organisation all the parts of which function like a living body. In physiological terms, this organisation is not hierarchical—the queen bee links the head and heart, and the drones become cells which must constantly be renewed. The whole makes a unit whose function is perfect, but in an atmosphere of human warmth founded on the principles of co-operation and fraternity. The bee is one of the themes that can be found again in Beuys's drawings and in a series of important sculptures: Queen Bees (Bieren Ròigen), the first of which is dated 1947 and the last 1952. All are made in beeswax or wood: two incorporate small feminine figures. Iphigeniea/Titus Andronicus This action took place in Frankfurt in May 1969, organised by the German Academy of Dramatic Art, and proceeded as follows: on a stage in a circle of rope, a horse was eating hay while a microphone placed on the stage allowed the noise of his hooves to be heard. Nearby, by various gesticulations and Movements Beuys interpreted classic texts: Goethe's /phigeniea in Tauride and Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus, which could be heard emitted from a tape recorder in a montage with C Peykmann's and W Wien's voices. The materials Beuys used from beginning to end were: a microphone, margarine, sugar, a piece of iron, cymbals and a fur coat. The procedure unfolded like a ceremony that places the artist in an enclosed position as regards the public and provoked different questions. Let us proceed stage by stage. To begin with, we have Goethe and Shakespeare's classic texts: /phigeniea, a symbol of sacrifice, and Titus Andronicus, a symbol of extreme violence. They are the two poles (Germanic “idealism” and Anglo-Saxon “realism”) which, in keeping with his “Theory of Sculpture” come together in a glyptic movement. Then we have the horse who is innocence, beauty, freedom; the a-logos (the animal deprived of logos). Finally, we have the artist himself with his gesticulations, his Movements, his voice and materials that are carriers of energy. At first sight, there doesn't seem to be a direct relationship be450

tween all these elements. And yet everything can take on different dimensions—if Beuys is seen as the man who moves between conscience, history and the “prospective” search between the intellectual and the organic, between chaos and order, then, as the critic Caroline Tisdall describes, we have the unexpected arrival of Man, “producer of time and space” the “coordinator” the “impeller' a man of heightened spirituality, initiated into “gnosis” and gifted with “intuition,” who knows how to respect individuality but at the same time, how to play a social role—an image-metaphor that Beuys gives us “for” Man and the artist. Such an image corresponds to his anthropocentric language which, among other things, offers something more in that it theoretically proposes the bringing together of both the individual and the community, and thus the experience of isolation and sociability. Individual - Collectivity - Theatre (The Nordic Element) Two actions displayed the similar intention of knowing how to live alone while at the same moment having communal space. This time however they had a Celtic theme. The first floor piece in Edinburgh in 1970 with Hennig Christiansen was entitled Celtic (Kinloch Rannoch), Scottish Symphony (Schottische Symphonie) and the second in Basel, in 1971, Celtic + —. This was not the first time that Beuys alluded to Nordic mythology— ever since he had read and been influenced by James Joyce's Ul ysses (in which he had discovered the spiritual values of the North) his tendency to draw from sources of “a Nordic element” had never left him. The Celtic performance at Edinburgh had been inspired by the Arthurian legend. As Beuys said: On the way to Edinburgh he had absolutely no idea what was the right thing to do. All he knew was that he would be going to give “a concert” But, as usual, he had been cautious enough to order all kinds of materials that constituted the organic part of ideas and obsessions which accompanied him from his childhood years and, as time went by, had transformed into fundamental elements of his language: Films, a piano and a whole load of other things. On the way he noticed an old stick which he considered worthy enough to add to the list. He then spotted an axe in a shop which he “bought” ...Later on, he had a look at the hall where he would be giving the performance and, as is his usual way, started fiddling about with everything there. In this way he gradually reached an obsessive relationship with space, a vehement and conflicting dance with all the material surrounding him. The intervention of his partner Hennig Christiansen serves to heighten the rhythmical tension to such a degree that it didn't take him long to find the solution which could enable the performance to spring into life. He asked the question “What is Scotland?“..and suddenly all his impressions, obsessions and ideas buried within him began to burst forth. Scotland, King Arthur's Round Table, the legend of the holy grail... and became elements on which he would base the performance that he carried out. 451

This theme, as well as the ideas that gravitated around it would not end in the Edinburgh performance but would be resuscitated in the 1971 performance in Basel, which hardly differs in its material from the first performance with the exception that it brought out the relationship between the actor (Man and a strengthened conscience) and the community—the social space—in full relief. At this time, he gathers together the following material: Three Philips tape recorders, an axe, a grand piano, a microphone, an aluminium ladder, a watering can, an enamelled washbowl with

a piece of soap, a basin filled with water the handles of which were decorated with two torches, attached to them by elastic, painted in black, and bound in insulating Scotch tape; there were also white cloths and a blackboard, two film projectors and a screen. Everything began when Beuys, in the presence of only photographers and cameramen, set about washing seven peoples' feet. Then about 500 spectators could come closer to watch him, lying on the floor pushing back a blackboard three times on which was chalked a drawing. Between each scene he would rub out the drawing and draw another. VVhen it reached the piano, he got up onto his feet and with the blackboard beside him and a shepherd's crook in his hand— pointed towards the drawing on the blackboard—began to meditate in a concentrated manner. At that moment three films were played one after another in the same auditorium: Eurasienstab, the performance entitled VaKuum ... Masse, and The Transiberian. After that Beuys spattered the walls with gelatine and immediately after, using a ladder and an iron box, picked everything off the wall, bit by bit. Then, standing in the middle of the hall, holding the full box straight over his head with his arms outstretched, he poured the gelatine over himself. He picked up the blackboard on which was drawn a chalice and brandished it (in the same way) above his head like a shield, spluttering inarticulate sounds into the microphone. He let the board fall to his feet, leaving it upright, and sat astride it while he held the crook in his hand like a spear. He remained in this motionless position for more than half an hour and to finish the performance he went straight to a large bucket full of water, attached two torches to his thigh, filled a watering can with water and stepped into the bucket where Christiansen began to drench him with the watering can. It appears here that the performance's development is cyclical—beginning with an act of offering to the others and finishing with a baptism. Again, this time, the characteristic elements of the artist's world are all reunited: life and death, creation, conscience, the individual, collectivity. The washing of feet—a symbolic image with Christian connotations—raises a socio-political Meaning—vwhich the individual is at the service of others (and it is here that the concepts of reciprocity and exchange should be located). However, going beyond individual egoism in no way expresses the individual's negation. To the contrary, during this performance, the individual manages his time and his space. The idea of the celebrant is especially present: 1. VVhen Beuys keeps away from the audience and does not allow it to approach until after 452

Work in progress on the stone parallelepiped for the “first” Olivestone vat, Lettomanoppello (Pescara), September 1984

the time of isolation and concentration that he needs to take part fully in the ritual, which, like the cycle of life, comes to a close by beginning again. 2. When Beuys pushes back the board three times with his crook. 3. When he collects the gelatine and holds it above its head. 4.\Vhen he brandishes the blackboard with the drawing of the grail above his head. 5. During the films.

This individual (the man-artist) is distinguished by one fundamental trait: creativity. It intervenes through the widening of conscience (the board pushed back each time), going beyond polarities to one solid unit (the theme of the films), and total unity of the individual and surrounding fragments (the collect, lifting the gelatine above his head and pouring it over himself: reproduced on the immaterial level when the hoard and the drawing of the Grail are lifted: these two movements—the overflowing of the visible and invisible, the contents of the chalice—being synthesized in the final baptism). This “concert” of creativity, of conscience, of the individual's relationship to society is maintained as a cycle which constantly opens and closes, and is tirelessly reiterated in a sort of alphabet, a persistent “work in progress. Contrary to many others, this takes culture into its field of action that, Beuys thinks, is the way that allows Man to rediscover his integrity and dignity in a social perspective. Coyote. | like America and America likes me This particular action, at New York's Rene Block Gallery in 1974, took place in the following way. An ambulance took Beuys—who was wrapped in felt—from John F Kennedy airport where he had just arrived from DUsseldorf to the gallery and left him there with a recently captured Texan coyote. In the space of a few days both the artist—still muffled in felt from head to foot, apart from a stick held pointing outwards his wrapped form—and the coyote managed not only to coexist but gradually and slowly succeeded in living together. Beuys talked to the animal, walking up and down playing a triangle that he had been hung on his neck while noises, emitted from a tape recorder, filled the room. In that space of time, the animal had urinated all over 50 issues of the Wall Street journal, the chronicle of American economic power. It had begun to get on so well with his “master; becoming calmer and quieter as each day went by, that by the end of the performance he seemed sad and uneasy at no longer having company. Beuys's fondness for animals was not a new thing. From the beginning of his artistic career, hares, sheep, swans, bees, horses, etc, occupied an essential place in his drawing, sculptures and actions. Indeed, animals embody the elementary forces of life, as opposed to stones and plants that can serve to transmit other higher forces. He recognised the meaning of collective consciousness with them; something distinctly more unreliable in Man, with his thought and 454

freedom and his capacity for both good and evil. He also finds many other qualities such as instinct and sense of direction that could be valuable to Man who, as Beuys says, needs new sources of energy. The coyote in particular, which is gifted with a very powerful instinct, is one of the more symbolical examples of consciousness in the relation between the community and the individual. Being one of the principal animals regarded as divine by American Indians before the arrival of the white explorers, it took on certain symbolic functions of harmonisation between nature and Man. After the arrival of the “colonialist liberators"the existing harmony was disrupted and from then on appeared the “wound"”—a growing injury that eventually led to the present deadlock of materialism and the inhuman exploitation of technology. We notice that, remaining faithful to himself, Beuys has anchored the beginning of a work in this “trauma” a machine for thinking which, leaning towards historical events, aims beyond them. He reaches the depths of one's soul through a revival of an ante-historic feeling from signs borrowed from reality. But let us take a step backward: Man today is generally acknowledged a wounded being, which is a de facto condition of America, but at the same time, is a “Western” situation. For precisely this reason, Beuys's performance began in an ambulance. What is the vehicle's destination? It has to be the place where “the wounded" exist: America and the Western world and their antagonism between Nature and Technology, Nature and Culture, Art and Science, and the “Money-God” (evoked by copies of the Wall Street Journal). What is the aim of this operation? Nothing but the fundamental will to materialise a desire: that the wound closes and heals and that after that, psychologically, the two incompatible forces (the coyote on the one hand and the isolated individual enveloped in felt on the other) start to coexist in a harmonious symbiosis. It is not easy to bring such an attempt to a satisfactory conclusion, for let's not forget that between these forces there exists a wide temporal abyss. We thus discover each opponent with his trumpcard. The animal has its instinct and its litter. The “vwounded,' who resembles a caretaker or a shepherd (we can picture images from childhood games), has his crook, the triangle, the felt (the insulator of America but transmissive of warmth for the coyote), and above all, his essential ‘anthropological materials’: will, compassion, thought and knowledge as well as faith in Man. The “struggle” was intense. Each one made use of his own domain, his field of action. The man rejects the felt wrapping (that isolated him) and risks coexisting with the animal who proves to be peaceful and content. In Beuys's alphabetic code, to be able to overcome the consequences of a crisis of positivist and materialistic thinking, Western Man needs new energies, and needs to recast conflicts and discussions in one solid unit which can only reside in a better attained 455

development of consciousness. The central idea of the Coyote suggests transformation. lt entails a metamorphosis of ideology into the idea of ferocity; a metamorphosis of language into an energetic practice; a metamorphosis of the monologue of will into a dialogue between those concerned and a metamorphosis of distrust into communal and creative coexistence. An interesting example of this performance's effect is the case of Jimmy Boyle, a Scot imprisoned for murder. After seeing some photographs of Coyote, he identified himself with the animal and not only did he begin a friendship with the artist, but he also turned his activities to writing and became an author.

Tram Stop This environment presented at the Venice Biennale in 1976 is founded on the idea of monument. The word “monument” signifies a link with celebration, with memory, and with the past. Traditionally the monument is erected on a central site with roads surrounding it so that itbecomes the point of departure, the roads leading away from the centre. Tram Stop is planned so as to exploit the principles of this spatial arrangement in two ways. Firstly, the notion of the monument is the centre from which every reference here takes its origin and, secondly, its structure follows the physical principles of a traditional monument. 7ram Stop is made up of the following three elements: 1. The monument with a field canon in the centre and four primitive 17th-century mortar bombs clustered around it. 2. A tramline which runs all the way past the monument. 3. An iron tube full of water, embedded in a lagoon in which is fixed an iron bar bent at the surface. Apart from these principal elements, there is a heap of rubble that comes from where the hole for the tube was sunk: through earth and water. It indicates the exact place Beuys used to get off the tram. Also, the metal bar coming off the water-filled tube is a schematic echo to the linear directions found in the three elements described above, moving vertically and horizontally. The metal bar plays a unifying role among the three constituents. All the elements are, as is the case in all his work, the fruit of the combination of his life and history. To explain this further: 1. As a five-year-old in Cleves, Beuys would get on and off the tram at the “monument stop," a Monument erected by Moritz von Nassau in 1652. There he would sit on the mortar bombs, surrounded by the three natural elements: air, earth and water. This intuitive moment from childhood has been interpreted into the work Tram Stop, not in order to relive the “good old days” but primarily in view of a selection of material that can undergo a transposition of universal range. The work itself has kept similar linear directions: a. The monument is erected vertically with the cannon pointing up456

wards, referring to the air towards which it is pointing. b. The tram line, the earth, emerges from and is set within it, thus the line is in contact with the earth, running along it horizontally. c. The tube filled with water relates to the water into which it plunges and is contained by pointing vertically towards the bottom. 2.The first three elements of Tram Stop are all made of iron. One is rusted, rough and plain (the cannon); the second is smooth, gleaming and rapid (the tramline); the third is supmerged and full of water (the tube). These elements are united beyond their different functions, through a common material: iron—a solid and resistant metal. 3. Tram Stopalso refers to the place where he was born and its physical characteristics. The link between earth and water is particularly accentuated in a region where there exist canals and lagoons; where earth and water constantly intermingle, each one skirting the other. 4. Moritz von Nassau believed that his monument should embody the struggle between love and war. Beuys's monument refers to the struggle of ideas, the inner struggle of the thinking man. This is manifested in the sad expression on the face of the man Beuys sculpted at the top of the canon. He appears to be emerging from the cannon in “the active pain of doing” and “the passive pain of suffering” (C. Tisdall). Between the passive element (memory) and the present (the embodiment of this memory) a connection between the thesis and antithesis can be expressed. Their synthesis is the duty of the thinking man; he is the centre. He is the monument. Everything radiates from and towards him. He is the future, having the possibilities and capacities to change and redefine tradition. I want to see my mountains

The title of this environment is taken form Segantini. / want to see my mountains was first shown in August 1971 at the Stedelijk van AbbeMuseum, Eindhoven. The objects used were an old wardrobe with an oval mirror and a drawer, a box, and a yellow stool, and above these, a mirror, a packing case and the frame of a bed in the middle of which was a small felt rug. All these objects which had been assembled together on a sheet of copper (in the centre of the room was a bulb burning over a felt insulating circle while in the four corners were sealed jars of gelatine) were closely related to the artist's memory, for it was the furniture of the room he had as a child. However, its arrangement was not a simple biographical representation; as we know, Beuys sought to bestow another dimension to the things he approached, to give them a poetic place in space and to connect them to sources of energy by imparting to his works a shamanistic course characteristic of creation. This-time at the exhibition in Holland a notice advised the public: “The title of this work Is not a direct reflection of what we see. The question arises of what is to be seen there” The notice gave another interpretation to the exhibited objects that was not immediately realistic but, linked to 457

a perspective which displaced them into the imaginary, bestowed upon them a symbolic prolongation. This is confirmed by the fact that, above the exhibited objects can be seen some words written in chalk. On the bed there is the word Walun meaning “alley” On the wardrobe can be seen the word adrec(t—a Celtic word for glacier. On the packing case, the word Felsen—"cliff," and sciora (a mountain range in Switzerland) written on the box. And behind the stool's mirror we find the word “summit.” All these matching elements construct a mountain landscape but not through a realistic representation. Here, the “real” is used as a metaphor: an allusion to nature, its relationship with Man and with his personal memory. There were also certain other objects such as a photograph on the wall, not showing the wardrobe in the same way as in the work itself; a second photograph on the bed, showing Beuys lying across the bed; and, above all, a rifle on the wall over which is written the word denken—"to think. Thus we are able to see the Beuys lebensraum and see his transformation through Time. He appears as a “partisan” who is fighting the confusion of thought. The rifle hanging here, airing, is an allegory of thought. The “partisan” fights on the side of sensitivity, concentration of thought and the transformation of something into creation in society. Here, we have the artist's regular motif: unity of art and life through a binary relation—individual (personal experience) and social (going beyond the individual to a communal perspective) which depends on flux, evolution, movement and change.

7000 Eichen (7000 Oaks) In 1982, as a contributor to the Documenta VII, Joseph Beuys took advantage of the urban situation in Kassel to launch his project 7000 Oaks, as part of his views on social sculpture. He stated himself that it wasn't purely an achievement of urgent necessity to the biosphere and to the pure matter of ecological coherence, but demonstrates during the procedure a much wider understanding of the ecological idea. An understanding which should increase more and more as years go by, because it is our intention to proceed with this activity continuously.

This action is situated between the limits of modern art and what Beuys calls “anthropological art” It is the praxis of a Shaman; a gesture that requires “signalling/’ Thus he placed a column made of basalt of about 1.20 m next to each ocak tree: This kind of basalt column can be found in ancient volcano flutes. Cooled down inside the chimneys in a specified and particular manner, it finally brings about its characteristic facets and crystalline shape. VVith respect to the particular cool-down system that activates an artificial crystallisation-likte process, the stone produces 458

these regular 5. 6. 7. 8. cornered shapes. They have been found in the districts of Eifel, showing beautiful and organpipe—like clearness, and can still be found there today, but partly under preservation of the National Trust. However, | haven't been too keen on these fine and special organpipes. It has been of much more importance to me to have a material at my disposal, that | can find in the Kassel region and which shows the characteristics of basalt. Thus | made out the kind of basalt exhibiting a half crystalline and angular shape as well as having a certain amorphous tendency. Founded on a well-defined plan, the plantation would stretch across many years so that for each tree a stone would be set aside in a storehouse and taken to the planted tree. We can now begin to understand the development of the whole venture: the fewer stones remaining in the storehouse, the more trees planted; and the process will continue until the final stone is taken. While the volume and height of the stone remain constant, the oak tree will slowly grow with the passage of time. 7000 Oaks depends on the movement, change and transformation of life and the social body. Moreover it is a metaphor that incorporates future behaviour into its perspective. Beuys stresses: As far as the first 7000 trees are concerned it has been of great importance to me to obtain the monumental character though the fact that each living monument is composed of two parties—the living being, the oak tree, steadily altering due to the season of the year; and the other, the crystalline part, preserving its shape, quantity, height and weight. The one and only possible incident able to evoke a change to the stone could be, for instance, taking away a piece from it or, if something splinters off, but never by means of coming up, like the tree does. Hence the two things are united, a continually changing proportionateness happens between the two parties of the monument. For the present we should keep in mind that the above mentioned trees have an age of six or seven years now, so the stone dominates at first. However, as years go by, the balance between the stone and the tree will be achieved and after a course of time of about twenty or thirty years to come, perhaps we may notice and become aware of it; and the stone gradually and step by step becomes an accessory to the evergreen oak or any other kind of tree. 7000 Oaks is a symbolic action attempting to show that a change in society can be achieved through everyday activity, and that now, more than ever, the search for a “third course” is needed, passing beyond the bipolar problematic of Marxism and capitalism. Every tree represents a human existence and is a radical outline of the possible transformation of the social body to tomorrow's community: a community that will perceive the needs of Man and nature in a different way. As Beuys said himself during the discussion

Difesa della Natura that took place in 1984 in Bolognano: These trees have a life that stretches far beyond any human being and this immediately introduces us to the contemplation of the element of time. This is perhaps what becomes apparent after certain moments in the life of this German artist, whose work has played such a fundamental role in post-war Germany and still continues to radiate in the history of human ideas. (from L. De Domizio, Joseph Beuys. L'Immagine dell'Umanità, MART - Silvana Editoriale, Milan 2001)

Dhemostenes Davvetas, Maladie et Théraphie du Sport performance, Bolognano, 17-19 November 2006, /pogeo

- Il Luogo della Natura. Servizi e Magazzini della Piantagione Paradise by Joseph Beuys

NALADIEETTHERAPEE DU SPORT

Demosthenes Daetas Bolegn, mano 17-18 E Nocembredé

Every possible future will be the result of the work we bumans do... Its up to us to create the future

(Joseph Beuys)

Gino Di Paolo

Joseph Beuys Thalassa Adriaké - Pescara, November 1972

i I

The long and silent path of the spirituality of Art, beyond the fire of life

Thalassa Adriaké, Installation in the

Pescara photographic studio

462

SIXTH READING Carl Giskes tierrafino.com

In the 1970s, during a seven-year walking-trip around the world, | experienced the health and comfort of clay buildings and it got me very excited. My journey took me through Africa, the Americas and Asia. After my return to Europe | worked for and with Joseph Beuys on several projects: From 1978-81 | was the director of Fluxus Zone West End in Krefeld. In 1981 Beuys requested me to run the Free International University for creativity and interdisciplinary research on Gut Schirmau in the Eifel and, later that year, to help with the realisation of his work. At the end of the 20th century, with my assistant U We Klaus | drilled the holes in the basalt columns. For the Documenta VII in Kassel, 1982, Beuys asked me to search when the first basalt stones arrived there. Beuys, Johannes Stuttgen and | planted the first of 7000 caks. The 7000 basalt columns | arranged according to his instruction in a triangular pile in front of the Museum Fridericianum. | taught several young workers how the basalt columns each had to be set next to the oaks in and around Kassel. Beuys smiled. He could hear birds singing in those trees. In Kassel | also got to know the clay architect Klaus Johanne Eckert, an admirer and student of the Egyptian architect Hassan Fathy. Eckert came to the Beuys info-stand to know more about Beuys. Professor Eckert was the first with whom one could study the art of clay building in the western world, at the University of Kassel. He has been my teacher for several years. Working with Clay became my goal. | wanted to build houses that were healthy for their residents and at the same time would stop the environment pollution. My first clay building project was the creation of an Adobe Pavilion for Louwrien Wijers under the banner of the initiative "Art meets Science and Spirituality in a changing Economy." This initiative was held in Amsterdam at the Stedelijgx Museum; panel meetings with, among others, Robert Rauschenberg, John Chamberlain, the Dalai Lama of Tibet, the scientist David Bohm and russian economist Stanislav Menshikov. To find the right scale for a project is something that | have learned from Beuys; in Kassel, Beuys first intended to plant seven oaks and so he asked me for seven basalt columns. Next day Beuys phoned to say that he wanted 70, a day later 700 and finally 7000. | realized that, to introduce clay as an ecological building material on a serious scale, | had to set up a company. In 1992 | founded Leembouw Nederland and so business became an ingredient of my art. The number of clay building projects | have realized since surmounts 1500. Many of these are puplic buildings. The first public building was a con463

ference room designed by Waldo Bien and Jacobus Kloppenburg / EI.U. Amsterdam. This building was designated for the spiritual education centre OIBIBIO in Amesterdam. | develop, produce and sell clay products, pure nature, and work as a construction contractor/instructor for building and plastering with clay. | train applicators in workshop. Education is my key message in the open framework of FI.U. Amsterdam. On Expo 2000 | worked together with the Al gerian clay-building architect Kamel Louafi. An increasing number of architects have become aware that clay is a healthy, ecological alternative, especially designers, architects, universities and education centres for ecological building around the world are feeling very addressed. DIFESA DELLA NATURA. These clay balls we produced during the FI.U. conference, to demonstrate the fertility of clay. Clay was mixed with water and the seeds of various plants and trees, than formed into small balls and put in the sun to dry. Seed Balls can be spread over the land. The clay protects the seeds for an over doses sun and for animals and supports the sprouting when rain arrives. | give seed balls to friends and clients to show sublime quality of clay as a building material. Also to draw attention to a significant re-forestry project in the Mediterranean, the Green belt Movement, initiated by the biological farming and clay ball pioneer Masanobu Fukuoka from Japan. Carl Walter Giskes, tierrafino.com FI.U. Amsterdam

FREE INTERNATIONAL UNIVERSITY

°f TRAVELLING COMPANY

464

SEVENTH

READING

Volker Harlan

Plastische Theorie Everyone knows the man in the hat. The man with the round head wears a felt hat, which protects and warms him. Everyone knows Joseph Beuys's Fettecke (Fat Corner), the corner of a room where the floor and two walls form a ninety-degree angle, where some fat has been put with the addition of sugar or clay, sometimes completely covered with felt or a layer of gauze. This strange sculpture is a sign, a mental sign, a symbol, which can be decoded in an iconographic manner, taking Beuys “Plastische Theorie" (plastic theory) as a starting point. Beuys maintains that plastic is set on a point on a scale which runs from chaotic and indefinite to well-defined forms. “Movement” is therefore found between “indefinite” and “definite” 10 In 1979 Beuys made this diagram for Johannes StUttgen as a dual diagram, with a line of reflection in the centre. On the left there is the chaotic tangle of lines, continuing towards the right in several movements, winding themselves one around the other, and even more to the right, under in the corner in question, there is a cube or grid, like those used for illustrating the position of atoms in a radiological image, of a crystal. The line between the left—and the right-hand sides is divided by scalar hyphens, which indicate from time to time at which point plastic is set between chaos and form. The same diagram is fundamentally represented on the right-hand side of the double sheet, but in a clearer, more rigorous and more ordered manner. The form leading towards the indefinite from the left hand side in particular is beautiful, drawn by a masterly hand. Turning the drawing anti-clockwise through ninety degrees on the right-hand side, therefore putting it on its feet, brings to mind something live and organic, almost like a plant. Where is the source of the Fat Corner positioned biographically and conceptually with respect to the Plastic Theory and the diagram of the “Plastische Theorie”?

After the War, in the forties, Beuys dedicated himself intensely to Rudolf Steineris illustrations, known as “Anthroposophy. He also studied critical literature, like works by Gerbert Grohmann, for example, which comment on the botanist Steiner's arguments regarding the pharmaceutical effectiveness of plants. Before going on this point, | would however like to illustrate briefly the creative plastic tendencies which can be found in a plant: 1. The flower. The flower is circular, radiant. In its composite flowers we can even note an “upper flower; a flower composed of different single flow465

ers, appearing in the form of concentric circles of various colours. On the outside, the petals are radiant (composed of single flowers), and on the inside, there are impollinated flowers, forming yellow circles, and the fecondative flowers. 2. The leaf If we think of the leaf of a plant, our internal eye usually sees a large leaf, fully developed, typical of the species and in its characteristic form. In reality, however, there is a series of other leaves on the stem before this leaf, and just as many after. In our imagination, it is easy to pass from one form of the leaf to the successive one. This process of formal mutation was described for the first time in 1790 by Johann Wolfgang Goethe, better known as a poet, in his brief work Versuch, die Metamorphose der Pflanzen zu erklàren (The metamorphosis of plants). In a small drawing Goethe illustrated this series of metamorphoses from the cotyledon up to the flower. Describing the series of stages of the leaf, their different functions and the form of the leaf, Goethe founded the “typology;" or “morphol ogy” as a scientific method. 3. The root The root was drawn in its characteristic form for the first time by Julius Sachs in the mid-19th century. The lateral roots sprout in series from the primary root, which sinks vertically into the soil, and they are slightly inclined downwards at a specific angle (the petals, on the other hand, are arranged in a circular or spiral fashion around the centre, while the leaves transform themselves into spiral form around the stem which grows upwards). The natural conditions of the earth act in such a manner that very soon this natural root structure is no longer recognisable. Many plants also use their roots as a reserve organ, thus allowing them to winter, while in autumn in our latitudes, the leaves and the flowers wilt. An Image of the carrot (daucus carota) shows this reserve organ, which can be found in the most disparate plant families. If we compare the creative tendencies of roots, leaves and flowers, we can observe that there are fundamentally three different tendencies. 1. The ROOT shows no crystalline principles, as can be noted observing a so-called crystal garden, in which we see, just as in a growing crystal, that its substance is superimposed layer upon layer, yet Its form remains unmodified. lt simply grows. 2. The upper and lower LEAVES on the stem of a plant are strongly reminiscent of flow forms. The lower leaves are round ish, often resembling a double vortex like that created when one fluid flows into another. The form of the upper leaves, also called high leaves, bring to mind the form of a candle flame, in which the heat and the gas rising above the wick become a flame on contact with the sur rounding immobile gas. 3. Already in the area of the high leaves, many plants spread out, and some, like the umbels for example, form their inflorescence in cascades of intertwining stems, above which we can find little flowers at the end, which are gathered in a disc despite their great 466

Joseph Beuys, Evolution, drawing,

1974

di i; L ed AW M

uu

numbers. Often the marginal flowers are bigger than those on the inside, in such a way that the individual flowers form a single flower. The plant stems are arranged in a sunburst form in the direction of the flower, and on the inside of the flower ethereal oils emit a per fume, the flowers sink into the nectar, and finally the stamen wilt thanks to a foreseen decadence mechanism, in such a way that the pollen can be transported out of the plant, through the air or carried by wind or insects, contributing to the impollination of all of the examples of the species. Taking the concepts of Paracelsus as a starting point, the doctor and scientist Rudolf Steiner, representing the link between medi eval knowledge and the science of the modern era, calls the fixed and repetitive creative principle leading to crystalline order “sal” As regards leaves, where no one form resembles another, but where one is the stage successive to the next, the creative principal is “mercurius! When the plant passes from the state of florescence and blooms, drips, impollinates and like the wild poppy (papaven begins to radiate the colours of a flame, there is “sulfur” as a creative principle. Steiner integrates his interpretation indicating two creative polar principles, which he calls “Umkreiskrafte” (radial forces) or rather “Zentralkrafte” (central forces). The radial forces can be represented in the form of a flower resembling the rays of the sun (like the dandelion,

taraxacum officinalis). The central forces begin

from a point and grow with the ray, like the crystals which grow from a crystallisation bud. The central forces, particularly active in the roots, create the crystalline structure of the roots and the accumulation of weighable mineral substances (the percentage of ash in the roots of the plants is the highest of the entire organism). In the development of the substances of the flower and the seeds, the radial forces lead to a greater measure in the formation of hyper energetic substances, such as sugar and starch products, ethereal and fat olls. In the margin of the Grohmann work read by Beuys, the latter clarifies this a polar principle with a small drawing. The polar principles of the flower and the development of the roots are easily recognisable, while the central mercurial area of the leaves is only evoked by two leaf examples. Thirty years later in 1977 probably during a dialogue at Documenta VI in Kassel, Beuys made a drawing on a blackboard which would do any botany textbook proud. At the bottom he highlights the geometrical-crystalline structure of the roots, while in the centre, beginning from the cotyledons, there are leaves in metamorphosis, which become ever bigger and finally withdraw, forming small, thick and close leaves, while at the top the principle of the flower is sketched in the form of a lemniscate, from which the stamen sprout. If we now imagine the design in the form of a diagramme which we talked of above once again, we are now able to read it immediately. In the roots (to the right of the middle line) the plant tends towards the geometrical-crystalline, without becoming rigid or inanimate like a crystal, and above, tending slightly towards 468

Joseph Beuys, Bolognano 1974

469

the left, there is the peculiar form of the cotyledons, which never passes directly to the leaf stage through metamorphosis. Then the middle line continues upwards, makes a wide loop and withdraws

in forms representing the high leaves. From these forms, the lines lengthen exactly into the flower, move away in circles and then approach, as was seen in the intertwining spirals of the upper flower of the carrot. Beuys obtains the concrete imagination of the triadic principle of the world from the plant. And we see in the different diagrams (in the drawing on plastic theory, for example), how Beuys analyzes the most disparate contents of the world from the point of view of their triadic character, orientating them in parallel to the plastic diagram. The multitude of these triadic relationships is exemplified in particular in a drawing which Beuys made in 1974—untitled, normally called Evolution.\Ne can note, for example that the plant with its three-fold structure—root, leaves and flower—is set in an alchemistic-plastic relationship with man. In the belly there is the intestine clutched in a line tangled in a chaotic manner, like the line in the left-hand part of Beuys's plastic diagram. Here man accumulates fat and the reproductive apparatus dominates the diagram, together with the digestive and metabolic apparatus. In the centre, where one leaf after another develops in the plant in rhythmic succession, man is anatomically composed of ribs and vertebrae, and physiologically by the breath and cardiac rhythm. The nerves, which have the least regenerative force of the entire body, are concentrated in the head. This, therefore, is the mortal pole of man. In collaboration with the brain, man collects perceptions like images and memories, and from flows of thought creates live crystalline concepts first, which are accumulated and stored in the form of memories. The source of prejudices and ideologies of every kind are found here. At the top on the right, Beuys places the three principles of the social organism in parallel to the plastic principles of the plant. Not to affirm a resemblance between the evolution of flowers and the ECONOMY, the growth of the leaves and the RIGHT, the formation of roots and the SPIRIT, but rather to indicate that the alchemic principles which can be found in the observation of the development of plants beginning from the roots and passing through the leaves to the flower are also principles which create the spirit, the rights and the economy in as much as the three are autonomous sectors of the social organism. Just like the metabolism pervades man but has its centre in the belly, the rhythmic system which distributes the blood from the head down to the feet has its centre in the heart, and the nervous system whose centre is in the head spreads from here throughout the body. And as such, the “spirit” permeates every sector of the state, remaining however distinctly separate from the “right, which must only assure equal opportunities with respect to the spirit, without ever claiming equal performances from every member of the population. The right has the single task of ensuring the freedom of the indi470

vidual in the state. From this principle we can deduce all the aims of the state. All of that which the state wants to give political order to is an intervention in the freedom of the spirit. The ECONOMY; in its turn, draws its innovation from the spirit and feeds the entire state organism with its products, which in a vigilant juridical regime should be subdivided fraternally among all members of the state, or better among all of humanity, if we want the human organism to remain in good health. Here we can only touch on the triadic principles. | will only add how, according to Beuysfollowing Steiner—the world evolution in its entirety (“Saturn" - “Sun” - “Moon"”) and the cultural development of humanity in particular (1 - 2 - 3, ancient times, Middle Ages, modern age respectively) have a triadic structure. Developing the plastic theory and drawing the diagrams of such a theory, Beuys gives the observer of the drawing the stimulus to see something aesthetically beneficial in these drawings, something already indicated for example in a higher form in the drawing of the double diagram. And widening the artistic and plastic principle, Beuys supplies a starting point for seeing both the outward appearance of nature and the cultural performances of humanity, and finally even the principle of a Triune and three-fold God, just as is conceived in Christianity, according to the principle of a concept of art extended from the alchemic and anthropological point of view. As regards the SOCIAL PLASTIC, we must however recognise together with Beuys that it is not easy to conceive. It poses problems and must be elaborated through individual work. This is clarified in the great design of evolution, since we today find ourselves at a point of evolution for which the individual tends to concentrate completely on himself, living in his egoism. Here is the cube which lies in itself. In the Western world in particular—but there are also tendencies throughout the worldfi nature and our fellow men serve to satisfy our needs. Consequently, he who cannot defend himself is exploited: first of all nature, but in a way comparable to man in less technologically developed countries. According to Hobbes, “recognizing something means to imagine, what | can do with it, when | have it” Beuys, on the other hand, would say: Fine Sache oder Person erkennen heilt, eine Imagination zu bilden, wie sie sich entwickeln kònnte und was ich fùr ihr Hell tun kann, wenn ich ihr begegne (recognising something means creating an image of how one could develop oneself and what we can do for its good when we meet it). In 1905 Steiner announced the “Fundamental social right": "Das Heil einer Gesamtheit von zusammenarbeitenden Menschen ist um so gròBer, je weniger der Einzelne die Ertragnisse seiner Leistungen fur sich beansprucht, das heiBt, je mehr er von diesen Ertragnissen an seine Mitarbeiter abgibt, und je mehr seine Bedùrfnisse nicht aus seinen Leistungen, sondern aus den der anderen befriedigt werden” (The less of the profits of his services of his performanc471

es the individual claims for himself, that is, the greater the share of such profits he gives to his collaborators, the more his needs

are satisfied, not by his performances, but by those of others, and the health of such a community of people who work together is so much greater). If we unite the two sentences, it gives us an idea of how Beuys added the “Warmefàhre” (the ferry of warmth) to his design of evolution at the bottom right. It is a utopia, an ou-topos, a place which has not yet been reached, a desirable social state, in which man is united with the others, like the leaf of a flower. The single leaves, still green have lived on the stem of an individual metamorphosis, specific to their species, in the course of which they have finally taken on the form of a flame, as has been demonstrated. Then, in a successive, superior stage in the flower, without differences discernible from the outside, the leaves arrange themselves in a circle one next to another, forming a new structure, a “social” organism, in which, in the forms of stems, they put their substance at the disposal of the other examples so that they can be fertilised. In this act of dedication to the others, they find a sense, realisation, and they too become fertilised by the others, capable of creating buds which lead towards the future, making evolution possible. The image of the flower is that of the “Sonnenstaat” (state of the sun), of the “Wérmefàhre"” (ferry of warmth)+the image of the state of the sun is the image of the flower, in which seeds continually form that fat which Beuys—symbolically taking care of the present and foretelling the future—transferred on to those cold individuals, isolated and almost rigid in the form of cubes, or rather in their corners. Thus the “Fettecken” (Fat Corners) were born. He thereby illuminated the dark corners, filled the hard borders of the angular structures with clayv—and so the head of this calm person needs the warm felt hat. (from L. De Domizio Durini, Joseph Beuys. L'immagine dell'Umanità, MART—sSilvana Editoriale, Milan 2001)

472

EIGHTH READING Gérard Georges Lemaire

Travailler du chapeau “Travailler du chapeau”: the Italians might say “dare i numeri” while an English translation might be “to go slightly crazy” The meaning is roughly the same. But the linguistic act has nothing to do with the chapeau, the hat, that is. So l'Il take another idiomatic expression, again from the Italian language: “levarsi tanto di cappello; which is the same as “bisogna fargli tanto di cappello; for which the English translation is “to take one's hat off to someone” It is by doing this sort of exercise that one realizes just how different each culture is from a linguistic standpoint. This time we have taken the verb “to work" and all that it implies: on the one hand, to produce (in Joseph Beuys's case, artworks, needless to say, but also thinking, which for this artist cannot be separated from the act of producing artistic objects) and, on the other, to go beyond the edges of the rational and, most importantly, the reasonable, which is what this idiom suggests. As it would be impossible for me to find a fitting expression in Italian, | will have to be content with “per non avere un diavolo per capello” (so as not to get wound up), and as this tribute is being held at the Nuovi Arsenali Veneziani, | must adopt a form of admiration that the French sum up in a single word: “Chapeau!” and that | shall express differently in Italian, for the sake of this audience, by saying that Beuys was an artist “fino ai capelli” (from the tips of his toes to the top of his head). No, my purpose is not to “split hairs!" Linguistics often leads to extrapolations that work just by a hair's-breadth. Before you tell me that you've had it up to your ears (that l've gone over your heads and that my words are giving you a headache) | will stop here and confirm what my good old friend Pedrocchi once said: “Hats off to him!” No, | don't mean to say goodbye and then leave when | take my hat off once, twice, three times before a man like the coyote. | won't “sweep off my hat" as | greet him. Because when it comes to hats Beuys was well-acquainted with a whole damned lot of them. Beuys can still be identified today thanks to the hat forever on his head. Rather like Charlie Chaplin, Max Linder, Buster Keaton. He is not remembered today for some everlasting masterpiece, like a Mona Lisa, a Last Judgement, a Judith and Holofernes, a Jewish Bride, a Liberty Leading the People or a Turkish Bath; for an Olympia, a Maya Desnuda, or a Demoiselles dAvignon. All we have is a piano wrapped in felt strips. But these magic words were never used to refer to him: you have to see him to believe him and recognize him. What remains of Beuys is an image, a photographic image declined to infinity. | found myself looking at a wonderful enlargement of a photo by Buby Durini. The German artist is leafing through a huge volume in which his Blackboards are reproduced, on which he angrily made 473

his chalk drawings that went in every direction, and that used white lines and arrows connected to words equal to concepts to consoli date an idea. In the picture he is wearing a hunting jacket (or maybe the sort of vest a fisherman might wear, l'm not really an expert) and, of course, his brown felt hat adorned with a black ribbon. The

hat hides a part of his face, but this is unimportant: without the hat someone new to the game would have a hard time identifying him. This is what leads me to believe that this artist is an integral part of his work, that he is actually a necessary and all-encompassing element of it. When | told a gallerist from Livorno that | was planning to talk about Beuys and especially about his famous hat, he confessed to me that he actually owned one signed by the master, which he religiously kept it in a glass case. Beyond the fetishism that encourages some to collect Giuseppe Garibaldi's bedroom slippers rather than Hoover vacuum cleaners or other objects, to purloin girls' shorts and make these the springboard for their artistic approach, these “spoils of war” clearly reveal an attitude that has become vulgarized and perpetuated. Like taking note of something. Beuys once said that the artist must see his or her work like a photograph, an openended image, and not one that is finite. This open-ended artwork is protracted in the work of another artist, one who was very much adulated, who pondered the force, impact, power of attraction of appearances and their transference to another flawed universe, that of art. | obviously want to talk about Andy Warhol, an artist who made numerous portraits of celebrities in his day. Some of them were artists, from Bob Rauschenberg (7riple Rauschenberg, 1962) to several representations of Jean-Michel Basquiat between 1982 and 1984, by way of Roy Lichtenstein (1972), David Hockney (1974) and Francesco Clemente (1981). Joseph Beuys made his entrance into Warhol's pantheon— a sort of School of Athens—in New York, and although most of the artists were chosen for their talent, they were also chosen because of their popularity with the media as well as their financial success. Here Beuys is in the midst of all these painters wearing laurel wreaths because they knew how to project their own images in the world and because they had known how to achieve glory and fame just like Hollywood stars. How is Beuys different? First of all, he wasn't a painter (and neither was Warhol). Nor was he a sculptor in the traditional sense of the word, but he wasn't one in a modern sense either. On the other hand, just as Warhol did in his own way, Beuys nurtured the idea of an artist who is a work unto him or herself. While Beuys observed the world and held on to what seeped out from its surface, Warhol wanted to change the world by turning everyone into a potential artist. It's not that he wanted to literally understand Arthur Rimbaud's plea when he proclaimed that poetry must be created by everyone, and not be based on a declaration that was the object both of tragic deceit and the most absurd speculations: he gathered the spirit and accepted the good wishes. iBeuys states that the future holds a qualitative surprise in store for 474

us: “The concept of art will be extended in its anthropological sense as social architecture, created by many people” When he establishes an absolute equivalence between the artist and the man, he declares that every man is a potential work of art. Within this gradual and irresistible slipping and sliding of aesthetic yearning he makes every effort to explain to Ammon Barzel: “Today the artist is an individual in a cage who works inside a system. He isn't capable of overturning the barrier of his isolation, which is defined by the term art, or modern art: we are here to prove that an alternative to the system indeed exists” But let's go back to Andy Warhol and his portraits. The American artist believed (whole-heartedly) that the photographed subject forces him or herself to resemble the image achieved. In The Philosophy of Andy Warhol: From A to B and Back, he says that: “Beauties in photographs are different from beauties in person. lt must be hard to be a model, because you'd want to be like the photograph of you, and you can't ever look that way. And so you start to copy the photograph. When Warhol takes his pictures he is less interested in the beauties than in the “talkers!" Beuys is one of these “elegant talkers"” who aren't prisoners of an obsession with beauty, and who are therefore not hostages of their own images. Warhol made a first portrait of Beuys in 1980, a synthetic polymer painting on canvas. The idea was to produce a negative effect by using black and brown. The brown of the artist's hat provided the basic tonality for this painting. That same year he made a screen print from it but this time with a blue background, and with diamond dust scattered all over it. However strange and incongruous this may seem, at the last minute the work was included in a portfolio called Ten Portraits of Jews of the Twentieth Century. Six years later, Warhol signed a new portrait of Beuys, after the German had died in January. To make it Warhol used a new computeraided system which allowed him to transform the surface in the manner of a sophisticated disguise. His idea of the extreme artifice seems to accomplish a love of nature he attested to by way of his model, in a forced but effective paradox. Your reaction to all this might be: this story about the hat is all very beautiful, but, frankly speaking, it's merely anecdotal. How can it interest us, since we're all gathered here to identify with this great artist's philosophy and to attempt to measure his importance today in the increasingly hypothetical sphere of art? You're absolutely right, of course. But my answer is that there does exist a surprising example and one that is known to all of us in the history of modern art that might explain the presence of this theoretical hat. | would like to recall René Magritte's message to all of us. This artist cultivated a “conceptual” vision of painting. As such, his painting says nothing, it reveals nothing, it neither expresses feeling nor moves the soul. It is there only to make an idea, sometimes a play on words, visible, or in some cases to express the wit that Sigmund Freud had turned into the keystone for a psychoanalytical reading of the psyche. Well, in the kitchen of his modest home on 475

the outskirts of Brussels, Magritte pieced together a small fictitious world where men dressed in black evolve. Almost all of them are identical: they all wear a long coat and a bowler hat. This hat, associated with a specific choice of clothing, denounces a total loss of identity. Tne man in La Grande Guerre (1964) has a green apple hiding his face. In many paintings, such as Le Chef-d'Oeuvre ou Les Mystères, or even Golconde (1953), these anonymous figures constitute a disquieting, noiseless and vaguely menacing crowd, in the act of peering out from an open window or floating in a light blue sky. Magritte loved to wear the same kind of clothing they do, and he would wear a bowler hat so as to resemble a bank clerk. Franz Kafka, a jurist at the Italian insurance company Assicurazioni Generali in Prague, also wore one. In a picture taken when he was young he is in the company of the waitress Hansi Julie Szokoll and a greyhound. Posterity has taken possession of this image of Kafka and his hat. Marinetti also particularly liked this item of clothing, and would daringly wear it whenever a photograph was taken of him with his group of Futurists. Marinetti succumbed to a fashion even when the situation did not at all force him to conform. Hats play an important role, if not a fundamental one, in the history of 20th-century culture. Kafka became a legend with his hat on his head. And Marinetti wouldn't be Marinetti without his bowler hat in the days of Futurist soirées and explosive manifestos. Others too have become famous in history thanks to their hats. What about Fernando Pessoa? He was an unknown during his life, in spite of the fact that he was no less than seventy-two poets at the same time through his inexhaustible play of heteronyms. He would pull himself out of a large suitcase in whichever guise he preferred like so many puppets. Alvaro De Campo, Bernardo Soares, Alberto Careiro, Baron von Teive, Ricardo Reis... He was all these poets at the same time and he was also someone who admitted nothing, because in Portuguese the name Pessoa means “no one” This also makes me think of a writer from Saint Louis, Missouri, who changed his physical appearance to the extent that he became any one of those Tom, Dick or Harrys you run into on the street but that nobody ever notices. William Seward Burroughs invented

a paradoxical role for himself because he wanted to be “el hombre invisible” and create a highly scandalous work at the same time. He dressed in the most non-descript way possible. An ambiguous desire if ever there was one, because his disguise as a good American citizen, an authentic passport to anonymity, did not take long to be viewed as the indelible man of his hallucinating and hot-tempered creation. So much so that in his first novels (Junkie, Queer) he was the hero of those miserable incursions into New York's underground world. And he was also the main character In the novel that made him famous, Naked Lunch. When he came to Geneva invited by me to take part in the Colloque de Tanger (but which took place in Geneva), | saw him get off the plane wearing a vaguely Iyrolean hat. Francois Lagarde, my partner, immediately took a picture of this famous hat. As his reputation gradually grew, 476

Joseph Beuys, Rome 1973

this hat “or whatever it was he was wearing on his head” was systematically associated with the image we had of him, as if it were an actual part of his persona. This association was so strong, of a mythological nature so deeply rooted in the spirit of his admirers, that it caused an incident during an evening where | was master of ceremonies at the Centre Pompidou. The room was packed and you could just feel the tension from the start. Burroughs had placed his hat next to the pages that he had chosen to read. When he and Brion Gysin had finished, they were surrounded by groups from the audience. Some wanted an autograph, others to ask a question, others still to have their pictures taken next to these giants. And all this was going in the midst of a great deal of confusion and an especially violent atmosphere that was getting harder and harder to control. In any case, someone took advantage of everything that was going on to steal Burroughs's hat. The next day the newspaper Libération featured an article about it, and the huge eloquent heading gave the incidence the importance of something that might go down in the annals of the history of the eighties: “Burroughs's Hat Stolen” After the Mad Hatter in Alice in Wonderland, hats began to hold an important place in the avant-gardes. To the extent that Tristan Tzara and his friends actually placed their twice-folded scraps of paper into a hat so that they could find a name for their movement; and that name was “dada. Yes, the Dada movement was born in a hat in

Zurich in 1916. This is more or less the word that went round shortly after the event, while some of its founder members had provided a different version of the facts. Whatever the case may be, Magritte sought to perfectly adapt his own way of dressing to the figures in his artworks. And Beuys went even further: he made his double disappear, and himself became the painting. From this point of view, his special relationship with the legend of so-called modern art is not limited to his hat. It is extended to all the pieces of his bizarre way of dressing and even to the objects that might incidentally contribute to it. | remember my first visit to the “Maison de Lucrezia” in Bolognano last year. Is it a museum?, I asked myself. Yes, it is unquestionably a museum, but a museum of a very special kind because you can't live in a museum. | observed this place rather like a theatre of memory—the story of a lifetime that you experience in an excessive love for today's art. For and through this art. Among all the artists who have earned a place in this aesthetic microcosm, Beuys had cut out a top-rate place for himself. Everywhere | went | kept running into enlargements of photos by Buby Durini, everywhere | saw bottles of olive oil signed by Beuys all lined up as though they were precious essences; crates of FI.U. wine which when coined with this password had become ennobled: “defence of nature” this too signed by the creator of B/umennymphe. Also visible here, there, and as | rounded a corridor, were a great number of readymades, that generally had to do with the artist's last angelic project: to reconcile man with nature, in total 477

harmony with the philosophy of the Illuminists. Beuys had given up the work of art as such, even in both its classical and more modern

manifestations, to instead undertake the great task of rectifier. He was never tempted to take the place of the divine Architect, but more specifically to restore what He had offered mankind at the time of the Original Sin, owing to the rupture between sacred and profane, and the fanatical obsession between these two separate continents, and to do so by founding his work in nature's own décor, in a design for the ideal garden (neither a French garden, nor an English one, nor any other form of garden known and loved up to now), but rather a Joseph Beuys garden stricto sensu. Mute because of their indefeasible yearning to annul themselves and serve Nature, his last creations are the offshoot of his theoretical path. In Bolognano | clearly understood that he hoped to not present himself to us ever again if not by way of an iconic representation of himself. In one of the rooms in the palazzo | was amazed to run into a large colour photo by Buby Durini of Joseph Beuys holding an open umbrella. An unusual image because he is standing in a room and not in the pouring rain. Today, this yellow umbrella with red and blue trim— actually a woman's umbrella—is on display inside a Plexiglas cube. The umbrella leads us back to René Magritte, Caillebotte and Renoir, to all the black umbrellas that, from Impressionism to Surrealism, have invaded the field of painting, without overlooking Jean Hélion's umbrellas, emblematic objects of his return to the figurative on a par with bowler hats. And let's not forget the fact that the Count of Lautréamont Isidore Ducasse had decreed that nothing was as beautiful as the chance meeting on a dissecting-table between a sewing machine and an umbrella. The “Human Sculpture” that Beuys dreamed of, more than all of these symbolic ties generated in the hope of releasing an earthshattering beauty, which is what André Breton believed, needs to reduce to nothing the relationships and the codes established between artists and the new members of their speculations. Before this hat, by now present in the spirit of all of us, a hat that belongs to the mysticism of modern art as much as Salvador Dali's soft watches, Pablo Picasso's Minotaur, Marcel Duchamp's

Fountain, and Henri Matisse's blue nudes do, the witty Magritte could easily have dreamed up a short composition with the words “this is not a hat” Just yesterday | found myself in Nathalie du Pasquier's studio in Milan. She was supposed to show me a group of black, white and grey canvases that she'd painted five years earlier. Among other things, there was also a mannequin head upon which she had placed a pair of dark glasses. | immediately associated it to Guillaume Apollinaires head in the famous painting by Giorgio de Chirico. This nameless head was adorned with a small hat in twenties style. | asked my friend what she had called this vaguely Metaphysically-inspired composition. She answered that it had no name. But when she saw how disappointed | was she invented one on the spot and without batting an eyelid said: "Actually | called it: ‘This is not Beuys's hat!” 478

| looked at her in disbelief. “No, l'm just joking/ she reassured me laughing. But | told her that it was too late, that her creation would bear that title until Judgement Day. “So be it” she said sighing. l'm sure you understand that at the end of these daring tribulations that have turned into a peculiar fairy tale | need to find an ending. Close your eyes and you'll see a rabbit with a pocketwatch, the Mad Hatter handing me Beuys's hat. | take it in one hand and with the other lift a magic wand to touch its rim. Doves or colourful scarves aren't what come out of the hat, but a miniature oak, a sort of bonsai. The slender tree begins to burn. There it is, | think, the burning bush of art. Now open your eyes and look carefully: the flames become golden letters that spell out these words: “| am a sculptor of souls. You see these words just as | do. All you can do is think of art in your time in these terms. And, even better, experience it this way. And this comes to mind as well: isn't it possible that he had pondered on Novalis's question “Is becoming a human being art?‘ l'm certain that he did. (Speech at the 52nd Venice Biennale,

2007, “Joseph Beuys, The living Sculpture, 100 Giorni Conferenza Permanente!")

Joseph Beuys and Lucrezia De Domizio in Beuys's studio in Drakeplatz, Dusseldorf, November 1973

Christa-Maria Lerm Hayes

“| will re-create Finnegans Wake anyway” Joseph Beuys Reads James Joyce

In the context of Beuys Voice, Zurich is renowned for Harald Szeemann's retrospective of the artist's work, and for Olivestone, an installation of coffin-like, but life-affirming stones at the Kunsthaus. They would have reminded James Joyce, former inhabitant of the city, of the megalithic monuments of his home country, Ireland, and may have prompted reflexions on a cyclical view of history. Viewing this work, art history can only renounce dogmas and note an oscillation between form and deep meaning: somethign that Georges Didi-Huberman introduced with Joyce as key example. It is also necessary to engage in close reading — in the way Beuys read Joyce, and how he is read at the Zurich James Joyce Foundation. Joseph Beuys wrote in his 1964 Lifecourse/Workcourse that he had read James Joyce's difficult late work, Finnegans Wake, in 1950, and that he “extended” the Irish writer's Ulysses. The resulting drawings of 1957-61, indeed, reveal an accurate knowledge, especially of the Wake. A later re-reading is to be followed in more detail, as a first edition of Finnegans Wake, preserved in Beuys' library, contains annotations (often of English vocabulary with the initial “C")-— and that on nearly every page. Beuys surprisingly learned English this way and, indeed, found basic vocabulary in the Wake. The artist did not read this book in a linear fashion; he did go into detail, but read in this universal work, instead of receiving it like an ordinary piece of literature. Finnegans Wake clearly accompanied him over a long period of time. The book taught him new ways of reading, and let him search for and find what he could consider his own in Joyce's world. If | was here able to trace Beuys' reading of Finnegans Wake in detail, it would be apparent how revealing the language games and themes that Beuys highlighted are in the context of his own evolving practice. There are even clues that his choice of fat and felt may be based on a language game in the Joycean

context. Clearly, Beuys could assume that Joyce himself would also have considered as important the homophone sound of their respective surnames: the passage that is most emphatically highlighted in Finnegans Wake is “The boyce voyce is still flautish and his mounth still wears that soldier's scarlet ... he was ascend into his prisonce on account off. ... Some day | may tell of his second storey. Mood! Mood! It looks like someone other bearing my burdens. | cannot let it. Kanes nought. (536,21-27) The speech apparatus was important for Beuys. He could recognize himself as a soldier and prisoner of war, who wasn't disinclined to comparing himself with Jesus (the bearer of the load of others), as someone about whom there is more than one story to be told, who carries canes (and draws “J"-lines into the margins). Beuys selected Joyce's phrases and motifs and transposed them into his own realm, where they are partially recognizable, but develop their own lives as leitmotifs and bearers of artistic and social meanings. Beyond the works with clear reference to Joyce, “re-creating Finnegans Wake” is to be understood as related to Beuys' entire oeuvre — not as slavish copying, but as independent creation, which realizes the potential of Joyce for sculpture, relates the writer's innovations to his own (often corresponding) interests, and “extends” them further in both language and sculptural substances. Beuys was (alongside John Cage) the first artist, who set himself this gigantic task explicitly. He used Joyce, especially Finnegans Wake, throughout his career as a point of reference — und thus became the first artist, who so clearly let Joyce enter in an engaged artistic and biographic trajectory. Beuys was and is in the right place, in order to understand — correctly in my view — Joyce's “recycling” as well as (in Eco's and Rancière's sense) open and emancipated work. And Zurich is the right place, in order not just to base an exhibition on Beuys’ ecological and meaningfully post-minimal installation Olivestone, but also to re-state the relations with Beuys' practice of Joyce's “minor” literature, which, according to Deleuze and Guattari is a priori political and privileges community. The famous Zurich Finnegans Wake reading group surely deserves the title of a Free International University for Interdisciplinary Research.

480

NINTH READING Pilar Parcerisas

Joseph Beuys. The Intelligence of Nature “Art is the complement of nature” “Art is complementary nature” Fragments, Novalis, 1878 In the last fifteen years of his life, Joseph Beuys paid special attention to nature to achieve a philosophical thought that brought together everything in this world in a common root that took them back to their origins to the total union between man and nature. In Beuys we find the botanical artist, rooted in Nordic mythology, anthropology and the natural sciences. We find the Joseph Beuys who collected animal craniums, minerals and rock crystals, plant leaves and animals’ bones. He put into action his romantic baggage that came from the German school of thought previous to scientific positivism, particularly that of Novalis, who said that nature has an artistic instinct and that making a difference between art and nature was talk for talk's sake, and that of Goethe, who saw Nature as a great Everything that is shown in an infinite number of shapes in constant evolution. Also that of Rudolf Steiner, who in his Theosophy attributes a mineral, vegetable and animal existence to man that merges him completely with nature. Without this philosophica! background, we would be unable to under stand such a complete action that spoils the myth as the plantation of the Diary of Seychelles (1980). Joseph Beuys himself said: Artistic activity is impossible without being aware of nature. This complete immersion in the world leads to a process of releasing man and his creativity in the social area. It is the utopia of causing a destiny of harmony between man and nature as an expanded form of art, setting up performance processes that stimulate the mutation of social structures through artistic communication and message. His actions/demonstration of the 1960s had consolidated his theory of art expanded with the consideration of creativity as capital and the transformation of contemporary man in the heart of an organic society able to generate the social structure in which “everyone is an artist” and banished an idea of art as one more of the artistic disciplines. This change of direction in his work opened up a period of massively attended discussions in the Documenta V (1972) where he installed his Office for Direct Democracy and later in the Incontro con Beuys (Pescara, October 3, 1974), and in the Documenta VI (1977), a reference framework for the great debates on politics, economics and ecological thought that Beuys developed with the members of the FI.U. (Free International University), with whom he started a programme of activities between 1978 and 1983. 483

The original energy from the South

This frenetic activity as an untiring preacher of an anthropological art in the arenas of a society undergoing change that started to become aware of the ecological debate was not enough for Joseph Beuys; not for nothing was he the founder of the Green Movement in Germany. When the Green Party was set up, he left. From his Shamanic, demiurgic character, he had to touch the myth, to return to the origins and ritualize the creative event from an atavistic South, noble and wild, a kind of archaeological paradise of the Earth in which the living shapes able to generate shape maintain their original meaning and all their creative potential. If, so far, he had been attracted by animals from the North (coyotes, jackals, hares, porcupines, etc.) from then on he felt a special attraction for the plants and the plant kingdom from the South. Following the directives of the theosophy of Steiner, Joseph Beuys related the body to the planetary geography and merged body and Earth in a lifesized scale map in which the lower part of the body is related to the earth, nature and animals, while the upper part, mainly represented by the head and the brain, is related to the spirits. Beuys made his first incursion into Africa in January 1975. For a fortnight, he travelled the beaches of Diana, in Kenya, accompanied by the photographer Charles Wilp, who documented this first experience publishing a book with eighteen offset illustrations which reproduced the photographs put together around an object, a test tube with coral sand. Here, Beuys stripped himself naked for the first time before Mother Nature, abandoning his habitual attire (hat, fisherman's waistcoat and overcoat) and gave himself up to the climate and the warm sand of the coasts of Diana, with a simple swimsuit, integrated in body and soul to nature. Here, he replaced the blackboards of Dusseldorf for the sand on the beach, where he endlessly drew schemes, drawIngs, spiritual notes that transported his autobiographical experience to a mythical setting. Ephemeral drawings that buried themselves, a story concerning the construction cycle of human life, from birth to death. Thanks to the photographer, Charles Wilp, this experience was preserved and has reached us integrally as far as the contents and intentions are concerned. Joseph Beuys became increasingly interested in leaving behind photographic evidence of his intentional actions. Therefore, this kind of photograph became one of the nodal points of his later works. He himself decided which photographs he wanted, he decided how they were going to be framed (many of them in iron) and laid out in the space, and he also usually designed the glass cases in which they were to be shown. In the artist's latter years, photography was a vehicle of communication that was determining for his story. An example of this are the photographic panels on the event of his retrospective exhibition at the Guggenheim in New York in 1979-80, which ordered staggered blocks, by means of which he explained, from the silence of the image, an autobiographical chronicle which linked his subjectivity to what is general and mythical. Without photography, the experiences related to nature, such as that of Kenya and other su484

preme ones, such as Diary of Seychelles could not be understood. If in Kenya, nature became merely the scenery for graphic action that could have been developed on simple blackboards anywhere else in the world, in Diary of Seychelles it is nature that is put into action, as well as the morphological conception that Beuys had of shape and of sculpture, driven by the motor energy of nature. Buby Durini's photographs are fundamental for understanding the creative process and the story of a unique, initiating experience that aroused and put into action the Difesa della Natura programme, that was carried out in Bolognano, in Italy, in the land of Buby Durini, an expert in cultures and bio-cultures, with the help of his wife and art gallery owner, Lucrezia De Domizio, the current heiress of all this Beuysian experience. The sea Coconut plantation in the Seychelles, on the beach of Coquille Blanche (Durini's house) in Praslin on December 24, 1980 made up the experience of the Diary of Seychelles, which is the founding event of these attempts to merge man and nature, which find their continuity in the Paradise Plantation in Bolognano (1982-84), consisting of planting 7000 different species of trees in danger of extinction on lands of Baron Durini and, finally, the planting of 7000 oak trees at the Documenta VII in Kassel (1982), in a process that lasted until 1987. In Kassel, Beuys accompanied the oak trees with columns of basalt extracted from a quarry in Landsburg, near Kassel, which he laid out, on their sides, at the feet of the planted trees, like primitive stone beings, the symbol of a cold, petrified state of a volcanic eruption that occurred in time immemorial. Basalt is a stone which he knows, which

contains the energy of what has happened in nature over the centuries and particularly the 20th century, a devastating century for man as a constituent part of nature. Beuys used it in the work Das Ende des 20 Jahrhunderts (“The End of the 20th Century”) (1983). At the end of the 20th century, Beuys saw a clash between the energy of nature and that of the anti-nature that man represents, and considered basalt to be the symbol of the revolution of the earth, the result of the heat of the volcano that models the shapes and the forces of nature. From now an, it must be man who activates nature; he himself must be the body of guidance and awareness of nature and provoke the revitalization of what can be petrified. A deal with nature

Joseph Beuys could not have found a better place in the world to seal his deal with nature than the Vallée de Mai, on the island of Praslin, in the Seychelles, a natural reserve declared World Heritage by UNESCO in 1983. The Seychelles are considered to be the oldest islands in the Indian Ocean, and both their orography and mineral constitution as well as the plant life and the animal species that populate them, such as hundred-year-old turtles, take us back to an original, atavistic time. The islands in the north of the archipelago, which are unique in the world, are made entirely of granite. It would seem that they were part of the disappeared continent of Gondwana, of which some forms of organic life have survived and that 485

date back to before the continental mass divided into two halves, meaning that the granite of which these islands are made up corresponds to direct remains of the west part of India. To the south of the Seychelles, Beuys found the counterpoint of the North continent, Eurasia (Europe and Asia) and the spirit that

enables it to merge bodies and continents. He related the North to the top part of the body, the rational dimension that the head and the brain represent,

the coldness;

while in the South,

he placed

what is more organic, instinct, intuition, the digestive tract, sex, the extremities and heat. The Vallée de Mai, in the centre of Praslin, is a paradise of 18 hectares which was preserved intact from the intervention of man until the 1930s and which is a natural museum of animal and botanical species that are unique in the world, especially endemic birds and mammals, crustaceans, snakes and reptiles from an atavistic world in a faroff time. Its Natural Park is rich in giant species, such as Coconut palms, particularly sea Coconuts, that only grow and reproduce naturally here. The palm tree of this unusual species of Coconut needs about twenty-five years to become adult and produce fruit, which can weigh between 15 and 20 kilos and is considered to The palm tree needs a thoube the largest seed in the plant kingdom. sand years to reach its maximum height. The male sea Coconut palm tree has a long inflorescence, in the shape of a male member and is covered in small yellow flowers, while the female palm tree provides a rounded fruit that has an impressive semblance to monumental female sex organs or buttocks. These erotic connotations have led the species to being attributed with aphrodisiacal powers which have created all kinds of legenda surrounding them, like the one according to which it proceeds from an underwater tree. The Vallée de Mai is considered to be an earthly paradise, a mythical place where it is said that man was born. Joseph Beuys, invited by Durini, landed in Praslin with his family on December 22, 1980, ready to activate his plantation of atavistic Coconuts in the Seychelles. He settled into a chalet that he converted into a laboratory where he brought together diverse materials, such as dried leaves, pieces of wood, firewood, fish bones, pineapples and diverse objects found on the island, as well as a small collection of residues from his life in the past, like an archaeologist, or better still, like an anthropologist looking for vestiges of a life in time immemorial, a practice that he had done since he was a child on excursions and trips to unusual places. Before the plantation, he proceeded to inspect the place, he looked for material, he observed the huge size of the plants and the fruits in the magical valley and he built instruments, such as a wooden bench, using a few common tools such as a machete or a metal watering can. According to Lucrezia De Domizio, he liked having conversations with the locals and going over his knowledge of the scientific names of the plants and their ecological values in view of such an exuberant reality. Coinciding with Christmas that year, on December 24, he planted two plants of the palm family, but with different characteristics, on

La Coquille Blanche beach. On the one hand, a Coconut palm tree

486

and on the other a sea Coconut. The first is more active and takes less time to be born and to grow. In a year it can grow to two metres in height and produce fruit. The sea Coconut, on the other hand, is slower; it takes between six and seven years to germinate. The sea Coconut that Beuys planted that Christmas morning germinated around six years later and a few days after his death, on January 23, 1986. Once more, in Beuysian thought life overcame death; the creative act regenerated into life beyond his death and had planted the seed of a self-generating art in complete union with nature.

Thought and Nature: Novalis, Goethe and Steiner In the Seychelles, Beuys rescued the spiritual philosophy of Novalis, the morphological thought of Goethe and the total merger of man “into the nature of man," advocated by Steiner's theosophy. As Novalis said, “In our spirit everything is connected in the most particular, the most pleasant and the most living way. The strangest things end up finding each other through a place, a time, a strange similarity, an error or any kind of coincidence. This gives rise to marvellous unities and to original connections—and one thing evokes all the others—it becomes the sign of many others and is designated and evoked by many others” With the plantation in the Seychelles, Beuys acted as a demiurge, in a creative event that promoted the natural state of nature. He could not have found any more atavistic and creative instruments than the Coconuts of this Island to allegorically re-found a time from before the world in a place interpreted as being a paradisiacal residue of a protocontinent. Beuys was the creator who sought complete freedom in nature, the absence of laws and the spirit of life, which channels art or, rather, which is art, understood as the complicity of nature, but outside mimetic or imitative schemes. As Lévi-Strauss pointed out in his anthropological studies, it is not man but nature that talks to herself through man, without him being aware of it. The other point of reflection that links Beuys"action in the Seychelles to German philosophy is the echo of Goethe's philosophy concerning nature (Naturphilosophie). Goethe conceived Nature as Everything both in appearance as well as in the interior, and saw it made up of natural shapes that, at the same time, were organized into protoshapes or original shapes (Urformen) in constant evolution. The observation, classification and study of the “natural things” (and here Beuys appears as a scientist and a botanical artist) next to intuition allow these protoshapes to be recognized and known, which only the “productive spirits!” as Goethe would have said, or the wizards who open “the eye of the spirit” as Steiner would have said, can capture. This evolution that Goethe sees in the shapes of nature does not respond to a mechanical evolutionism but to a morphological evolution. A morphology that seeks the unity of visible things, based on finding the type, the prototype, the unitary abstract configuration of the original shape (Urform) from which the rest of shapes derive. Goethe found this morphological unity of protoshapes in plants (Urpflanze) and in animals (Urtreren), which possess shapes derived from the Urformen or original shapes. 487

This is how morphology was born, assigned to the natural sciences which, according to Goethe, must contain the doctrine of shape, of the forming and transformation of organic bodies, even though their own evolution and study require the need to determine the genealogical relations of the lineage of living beings and of their common ancestors. With the planting of the Coconut palm tree and the sea Coconut, the legend becomes reality: that of the appearance of man on the earth in Praslin in a stretch that branches out to the East and the West. In the Seychelles, Joseph Beuys found a redoubt of original shapes, or rather, Urformen that go from the islands themselves, the remains of a protocontinent, with their granite mineral component, to the extraordinarily original shapes of the forms of the sea Coconut, in a world that is almost original and from the South, the most organic part of the body, the most creative in the order of instincts. We should not forget the importance that Goethe gave in his scientific studies to granite, which is still one of the mysteries of geology, or the aesthetic use he Made of it in the fourth act of the second part of Faust, when the granite peaks appear in the founding act of the earth: “Faust: This group of Mountains is nobly silent. When nature founded herself, she rounded the globe, she wanted to please herself by raising the peaks, opening the abyss and supporting rocks on rocks, mountains on mountains, later adding hills, the slopes of which became gentler in the valley.” Beuys put into practice Goethe's nature philosophy; he intensified his specific experience of the world of living shapes and made nature take on greater plenitude with human intervention, as “nature and man belong to each other” Joseph Beuys looked at nature in the same way that Goethe did, in that scientific spirit is not at odds with feeling, imagination or intuition, in fact, quite the contrary. By means of a contemplative look or based on observation, that which Goethe called Anschauung, "the scientist can see God in Nature and Nature in God” Joseph Beuys, like other scientists, Heisenberg for example, believed that science and nature are not at odds, but that they are in fact complementary. Heisenberg said that there should not be a conflict between accepting the findings of modern physics and a Goethe-like contemplation of nature. Goethe introduced a sensitive component into science, based on imagination, feeling and intuition, that positivism had banished from the scene and that Beuys recovered to integrate intuition and reason, science and art together. For Joseph Beuys, as well as for Goethe, knowledge and science were instruments for the journey of life. Scientific baggage is part of the load with which to face the tragic experience of every day, and provides the corpus of defence necessary to overcome it. The other philosophy with which the action of the Seychelles can be matched is Rudolf Steiner's theosophy, which believes that man is bound to the world in body, soul and spirit. In the body, the world that the body perceives is revealed; for the soul it builds its own world bringing things closer to its existence for pleasure, attraction or repulsion, and for the spirit it reveals a world that is “superior” to the other two. Steiner said “Like minerals, [man] builds his body based on substances borrovwed from nature; like plants, he grows and reproduces; like ani488

mals he perceives the objects around him and with the impressions that they produce in him, he forms interior experiences inside him” Here, we should remember the meeting between Joseph Beuys and Alberto Burri in Perusa on April 3, 1980, a few months before the planting in the Seychelles. Italo Tomassoni made notes on this premonitory meeting of the island event in which Beuys explained on six blackboards his organic, ecological system from a theosophical approach: “The form of an olive-tree, the form of a cypress, the figure of a horse or the life of a rabbit; or the sea, the hills, are part of the human interior. They are organs of man, in the same way as the liver, the heart, the lungs, the kidneys, and everything else” In the Seychelles, Beuys developed reproduction and growth, something that man has in common with plants and animals and that he does not share with inert mineral nature. Something living is born from something that lives and the development of a living being depends on other beings of different genders, male and female, of the species or stock to which they belong. The substances of which they are composed changes, but the species survives and lasts in its descendants. Steiner says that it is the species that determines the gathering of substances and, specifically, the life energy or force formatrice. It is clear that the sea Coconut planted by Beuys in Praslin is an example of this creative, vital energy, coming from the generative energy of this thousand-year-old species of palm tree. “In the same way that the mineral forces are expressed in rock crystals, the vital shaping force is shown in species or in plant and animal life forms” The crisis in the relationship between man and nature

The Goethe-like look returns in Beuys when it comes to talking about the crisis in the relationship between man and nature. Joseph Beuys was one of the first people who, in the 1960s and 1970s, led the ecological fight and mobilized the social community (we have already mentioned that he was one of the founders of the Green Movement in Germany) towards the vindication of nature as an organic everything, of which the human being forms a part, in the same way that nature is integrated into the human being. Taking this intimate relationship between man and nature into account, its degradation is the reflection of the degradation of an awareness of nature and, as a result of this, the ecological crisis is a portrait of the crisis of our relationship with nature. In this sense, there is a disease;

our awareness of nature is sick and needs to be healed. \VVith the plantation action in the Seychelles, Beuys appealed, at the same time, to a therapeutic action, which would re-found and re-update the original event of the creation and the physical and spiritual birth united to the geological creation of the earth, to the appearance of the mineral, vegetable, animal and human world on the earth. It was a simple act, but one with great spiritual strength, designed for creating awareness about this crisis in the relationship with nature into which man has fallen by abandoning and separating the domain of imagination and intuition from sensitive experience. 489

This Goethe-like path that Beuys followed is a path of respect and reverence towards nature and not a path of manipulation and cruel control, which is what opened this crisis of awareness of nature, as well as that of many other things in today's world. Therefore, it should not have been surprising that Joseph Beuys appeared in the Seychelles without his The habitual hat, although he still maintained his usual way of dressing. gesture, which was bom of an attitude of respect towards nature, aimed to be an external sign of humility in a ritual in which he acted as leader and guide, unleashing an event in which nature would do the rest. As Jeremy Naydler points out, “the Goethe-like approach to Nature depends on the development of the human conscience towards a healthier perception, and towards degrees of harmony of the creative, shaping forces within Nature that are increasingly more subtle. Goethe shows us a path in which the healing of both—man and nature—is implicit in the “delicate empiricism” he adopts. Both Goethe's proposal as well as Beuys's show a scientific path which, through the intensification of the experience of nature, will end up revealing its spiritual dimension. Naydler tells us that it is a “path along which human beings can recover their integrity within an experience of Nature which opens up to what is sacred, thus converting it into the means to re-sanctify Nature herself" Through the promotion of the birth and the growth of a plant with millennium origins, in the Seychelles, Beuys ratified his belief in the forces of nature, forces that renew themselves thanks to the sun, the star that gives energy and warmth to each and every thing in this world, and particularly plants; which allows photosynthesis and the appearance of chlorophyIl in a renewed, spontaneous way. The sun is the only transforming energy able to give life and to activate all the forms of growth in nature. Once more, in the Seychelles, Beuys valued the increasing growth of the plants, fired towards the heights, but he started from a principle that unified the high and the low, the north and the south, the east and the west, all in one. In his thought, which tells in detail the analogy with the evolution of nature, what is below is also above, in such a way that scientific thought and artistic creation respond to the creation of the universe.

Nature and transformation of society

As we have been able to observe, the vindication of nature and of ecological balance does not correspond to a simple revolt of a period, that of the 1960s and 1970s, impregnated by a desire for the transformation of a post-war society anchored in static principles and with an object and not very performance-wise idea of art, still linked to the genres and the artistic disciplines, to skill and to artifice. Beuys was to revolutionize this conception of art at the Kunstakademie in Dusseldorf from which he was expelled in 1972, precisely because of his anti-academic, revolutionary methods, linked in some way, to his idea of Nature, or rather, to the intimate relationship between man and nature. Beuys's thought with regard to nature comes from far back. It is anchored in a recent past that science has abandoned. He cannot con490

ceive the life of man separated from Nature, and even less so, a separation caused by a scientific pretext. Beuys tried to repair this fracture between what is natural and what is artificial, placing anthropology and humanism on the same track on which only one demiurgic force can drive, that of the artist who acts as a transforming guide for society. A utopian look aimed at the reconciliation of contrary parties, at the pit of opposed counterpoints, at the fusion of reason with intuition, of art with antiart, of north with south, of what is natural with what is artificial, of science with art, of art with religion, an art of synthesis which seeks a “concept of increased art” which, based on Steinerike schemes, tries to reach an anthroposophical, broadened vision of the work of art, understood to be the obtaining of the “complete work of art" At the same time, in all his works, there is a transit, a dynamics that transforms a vital substance and generates a process of transsubstantiation that models with the help of will power and of creativity and through a tool composed sometimes of natural materials, which he combines at other times with optical or sonorous elements or technical equipment that symbolize the mechanical world, the person, his thought and his ideas. This is how he manages to formulate his theory of the “social plastics,' in which Substance = Person. As Italo Tomassoni reminds us, “In Beuys's view, in fact, it is the artist who has the power to prolong the cycle of nature through his works, eliminating the distancing effect represented by the artificiality of art, which is immobility, staticity, pause, invention, extrapolation, addition. The work of Joseph Beuys therefore enters consciously and entirely into the flux of nature, prolonging it and conserving its movement even without the need for a contemporaneous relation with society. Certainly, Nature is not just the frame or the container of the mineral, animal and vegetable world, but also the social experiences. Beuys wanted to impregnate society with awareness about nature and therefore, to defend man, he dedicated the last fifteen years of his life to defending man and safeguarding nature. In his construction of a new man, man and nature work together with the alm of constructing a new world. The plantation in the Seychelles was an action/demonstration of a great magnitude, which symbolically spread this awareness about nature throughout the world from a primordial place, from a Goethe-like Ur, the formulation of which is upheld as a hidden, invisible plastic work in a long process of transformation and germinal evolution that culminates in the birth of a Coconut, a process that by chance, would take until Joseph Beuys's death, as if his death were symbolically connected to this birth and to the Steiner system of reincarnations. Leaving speculations to one side, it is true that it was not the first time that the idea of death in Beuys's life had been associated to a rebirth. Anthropological art following pages Joseph Beuys, Diary of Seychelles, December 1980

\Ve know that diverse episodes in the life of Beuys refer to vital, existential crises that took him to the brink of death. The best-known 491

one was when he was rescued from his military aeroplane which crashed in Crimea in 1943. He recovered thanks to the care and the warmth of the Tatars who helped him. The other crisis of a physical and spiritual nature, that of 1957 retained him in the house of his friends, the brothers Franz and Joseph van der Grinten, and provided him with a vital, artistic resurrection that was to transform his religious sculpture into a new conception of the work of art which, by means of action, drew a new paradigm in which Beuys was to develop his later work. The spiritual depth in the work of Ignace de Loyola and the Spiritual Exercises written in the Valley of Cardener were to lead him to the Manresa action. Held in the Schmela Gallery in Dusseldorf on December 15, 1966, the action opened the doors of the formulation of his social plastic work for him and made him undertake a path of political and social action (in the same way that Ignacede Loyola also created and expanded his Church) that gave place to the creation of the German Student Party in 1967 to the founding of the Green Party and, in short, to an art based on social work and the great formulation that “everyone is a potential artist” if he uses his capital as creativity. AIIl his new ideas on politics and economy formulated in the 1960s came from this. However, none of this can work if man does not re-establish his awareness of Nature. With his action and movement art, with his artistic message, Beuys wanted to stir the social structures, because art is an activity which, from an anthropological point of view, extends itself to all the activities and actions of the human genre, promotes the development of the person and the improvement of all society, which must lead to the freeing of man and his self-determination. All the theories, all the ideologies, all the economic and political theories, as well as all the branches of science, including the knowledge of nature, are at the service of freeing man. We know that another of the esoteric sources that was part of the background of the artistic and spiritual proposal of Joseph Beuys was the Rosicrucian movement. Italo Tomassoni reminds us of it when talking about the rose as a symbol in Beuysian work, in which this flower ended up having a political Meaning on the freeing of the being: “Nature is also the symbol of the flesh rebelling against the oppression of the spirit," which for the Rosicrucians was symbolized by the rose, “the revelation of the harmonies of being” Beuys, in fact, was to place the rose at the centre of his work A Rose for Direct Democracy (1973), a synthesis of nature and science in which vital and chemical energy combine to form a further potential in the alchemy of the work of art‘ If the plantation in the Seychelles was a symbolic act, the expansion of the planting of 7000 oak trees in Kassel two years later represented the attempt to make a vital transformation in the whole of society and of all the space in an ecological space. It was a starting point towards the culmination of

the social process in art based on one of the pillars of his thought that he was to develop from then on: the vindication of Nature as the putting into practice of a utopia, which was directly implanted in

494

reality, in the earth, like the plantation of an oak tree or the Coconut trees in the Seychelles. There is a germinating idea, which separates it from the static things of this world to release it to an idea of growth in common with nature. This is where the stone-tree duality came from that he promoted in Kassel with the oak trees and the basalt stones, because the horizontality and the dead weight of the stone transformed into living sap in the growing tree. The symbolic passage of the Seychelles, which could seem anecdotic, is more important than it would seem. The person who has come up with the most accurate interpretation of this Beuysian episode is, without doubt, Tomassoni, who believes that in the Seychelles, Beuys reconciled “natural determinism” with “cultural freedom” by means of a series of testimonials which, although they have not achieved the total difference between the opposed concepts, he believes that at least they have shortened the distance. For this author, who personally discussed the content of this action and his thoughts about nature with Joseph Beuys, Diary of Seychelles marks the conclusion of the parable of initiation that informs the whole relationship between Joseph Beuys and nature as expressed in art. Initiation in the defence of nature as a resource and as transcendence, as ecumenical naturalness and a strategic place for the exploration of a path that consumes and resolves Hegel's prophesy about the death of art” The reconciliation of contrary things that Joseph Beuys operated had, in the end, a therapeutic function, that was born from the awareness of a world split up by antagonisms, on the brink of destruction. Thus, the work and the thought of Joseph Beuys were developed like a map of life that measures and points out the weak points of the human existence that art—from a new broadened per spective—must help to heal. The episode in the Seychelles emerges like lava from a volcano from the depths of nature and from the unconscious human and constitutes the corner stone of his desire for the ecological fight so that society becomes aware about Nature and about the fact that one is part of the other. Beuys did not go to the Seychelles with the vocation of an anthropologist to tell the story of his ethnographic expeditions, as LéviStrauss did with his trips to Brazil. Beuys went to the Seychelles to complete a specific mission, to start an initiating process as an artist seeking the revelation of an exemplary process. As Tomassoni said, “by the light of the Indian Ocean, Joseph Beuys has not touched on the ‘sad tropics' but on the blinding happiness of the myth. Buby Durini did a photographic follow-up on the process, not just the action in itself, but also the route, the exploration, the observation method, the creation of the instruments and of the options, of the hugeness of it and of the human scale, of the respect for the context. Durini filmed the tactile sensations, the observation and the contemplation of the flora and of the hundred-year-old trees, as well as the old, secular animals like the turtles, or the locals, human specimens of a primitive culture hardly touched by western civilization. Altogether, a cosmological vision of nature that included man as one more part of it, understood in all its unity and, at the same 495

time, diversity. AII the elements of nature (the animals, the plants, all the living beings) spoke to Joseph Beuys and he was even able to capture the symbolic vitality of the stones. This exemplary awareness of nature that he started in the Seychelles, he also developed, particularly in Italy, in the south of the country, first in Naples and then in Pescara and Bolognano. Italy was the great pole of attraction for the big German romantics (Goethe, Wagner), who made their trips to Italy into a work of art, an example of the return to classicism or the observation of a country with a culture deeply rooted in the land. Italy was, as Ireland was for Joyce, what inspired his Jhe Secret Block for a Secret Person in Ireland, a periphery, a land he considered that still preserved great integrity and worldly coherence, a happy place, a land in which it was possible to develop a creative task. Italy was the country in which Joseph Beuys would spend most time, after Germany. He first entered Italy during the Second World War by chance and involuntarily and he took thirty years to go back there. But he always retained an unforgettable Memory of it and, as he confessed to Germano Celant, he was greatly impressed by Italian people and culture (“| really loved Foggia” said Beuys). These memories would lead to works done in Italy, such as Die Leute sind prima ganzin Foggia (1981). Certainly, in this country Beuys found a land culture that was deeply established in the spirit of the people and particularly in his patrons and mentors, the Durini family, owners of immense lands in which he was able to develop some of his ideas which were fundamental for the renaissance of agriculture. But also, vvho knows whether, like other brilliant intellectuals from German lands, Joseph Beuys was nostalgic for the Mediterranean, for a mythical land that German culture had incorporated into its melancholic baggage. Italy was to be the land of the concretions, of great discussion, but also where he would set up specific utopias. Land rules.Beuys was an atypical sculptor, who started sculpting wood and stone for religious purposes and ended up modelling souls. His spiritual crises took him from the production of images and objects to a social plastic work. The raw materials he sculpted were thought, philosophy and ideas that he had to transmit through words, actions or life behaviour. Beuys started a new process of contemporary art based on the crisis of contemporary man, based on the split between Man and Nature, based on an identity crisis. As a result of this, he worked with man for man, to improve the methods available for transforming Society . first thing he did was to demolish the hierThe based on experience archies between the artistic disciplines and to talk of creativity in all the areas of human life and experiences. In fact, he opened a process which now seems unstoppable and that dissolves art into life, a process in which there are still many people who do not believe, despite the fact that it has been proven in the day to day of art and of artistic proposals and with regard to the evolution of society. It was an anthropological art that promoted a new idea of the artist and of art. It is because of the fact that his theories affected man directly and concerned everyone, that Joseph Beuys was an uncomfortable artist, because far removed from all sophistication, doing without 496

the admired artifice with which we conveniently pay court to a work of art, Beuys showed wounds, crises and suffering as a part of life that needs to be healed, in a diverse way, but always in harmony with nature, which he stated in the layout of natura naturans, such as in the trees in Kassel, or as natura naturata, whose container and content, proceeding from nature, come close to the shape, as is the case of the stone (solid) and the oil (liquid) in Olivestone (1984). The complex nature of Joseph Beuys's thought caused an impact on the world of art from which it has not yet recovered. This integral system. of merging art with life frightened the world of art and the economic interests of the traffic of artistic objects, dealt with as trinkets for the dissected and fragmented thought of today's man. The evolution of society, its mood, political and economic crises are showing Beuysian thought to be right, that made the entire existing world pass through the experience of art. Therefore, perhaps we should recall some of his statements that clinch the key of this anthropological attitude towards today's man: The “everyone is an artist” line demands from man much more than that which artists can expect when they paint magnificent paintings. Indeed, this has a certain value. But for the future of man, this is not decisive. What is decisive is applying the concept of “artist” to every man, to his work in general. And later it will be seen that the path that goes through what is known as “art” is not that which contributes most to Art. The broader concept of “everyone is an artist” art is not easy; but it is more clearly necessary for Art.This is how Beuys conceived “social plastic work)” understanding art as a path of salvation and as a redeeming feature of modern man for shaping a future social order.

Cover of the volume Joseph Beuys. Diary of Seychelles, Fundaciò Caixa, Girona 2009

following pages Il Giardino di Beuys,

Parc Rojg, Girona (Spain), March 2009

497

Re

Conversation between Lucrezia De Domizio Durini and Pilar Parcerisas

Pilar Parcerisas: Beuys's work in the Seychelles in December 1980, judging by what he says about it in his book, published by Charta in 1996, constituted a unique experience for him, with extremely strong emotions being turned into stimuli and impulses that Beuys was able to transfer to that unspoiled Nature. In fact, in those places that he called “sacred” Beuys began to work in symbiosis with his Mother Nature, employing a vegetation-based formula that must necessarily be interpreted in its entirety as a process of great spir itual significance. You describe it as the start of “a colossal age for art‘ You and your husband, Buby Durini, were the only witnesses to this kind of planetary initiation. Here we are in 2008 and twenty-eight years have gone by. Society has undergone great changes and transformations as a result of technology, science and globalization. Man has become his own ex ecutioner. Do you believe that Beuys had an early inkling back then of this worldwide dilemma, a situation in which economics, profit and the loss of human values prevail over man's life? You have spent the last fifteen years in direct contact with Beuys, constantly collaborating in the operation Difesa della Natura, working together in the creation of a new idea of art. However, what is extraordinary is that since the German master passed away prematurely on January 23, 1986, you have tirelessly devoted your ener gies, your entire existence, to disseminating Beuys's philosophy all over the world. | wonder what lies behind such intense dedication. And that is why | would like to begin a conversation with you about Beuys thinking, analyzed from a contemporary standpoint. Lucrezia De Domizio Durini: As | see it, the answer is very simple. In my life | have been fortunate to receive spiritual nourishment and energy from one of the most significant and emblematic figures in post-Second World War art, namely Joseph Beuys. | have experienced unrepeatable historic moments, fortunately captured by the magic lens of my husband, Buby Durini, who as a friend and scientific collaborator of Beuys was able to follow and document irrefutable historic events constantly, with passion and love, and in many countries around the world. This huge accumulation of experiences, teaching and messages has enabled those dreams which as a young girl | had tucked away in a drawer to come true. My faith and courage were awoken by Beuys. He entrusted his cultural legacy to me, making me understand, above all else, that suffering, as a fundamental experience of life, involves an awakening and expansion of one's faculties and this fluctuating and transitory process, in which time and space and their manifestations take on a specific form for Man, has brought me salvation in my deep personal tragedies. What is more, Beuys always felt that intuition was the highest form 500

of reasoning in that it can reveal levels of perception and understanding that go beyond rational analysis. For Beuys, intuition constitutes the broadening of a limited way of thinking: the conquest of both quantitative and qualitative thinking. In this respect Beuys showed me his predilection when he told me: “keep the flame alive” Meanwhile, you Doctor Parcerisas have an in-depth knowledge of Beuys's Manresa action of December 15, 1966, in which Beuys refers to intuition. You have analyzed this hugely important work better than anybody else and you are therefore aware of the profound spiritual and specific meaning of a possible historic voyage of initiation. A precise understanding of Josep Beuys as somebody who predicted all the problem issues affecting humanity today can be reached on the basis of the three weapons that he used throughout his life: drawing, performance and discussion. This royal trinity is reversible and indivisible in a concept of time and complex symbols in which theoretical references show a connection that begins with “form/project/ continues with “body/material” and ends with “voice/spirituality!” Drawing (men, animals and plants) was Beuys's first form of expression as a child in an attempt to reflect his many different childhood experiences. Later on, during his artistic career, drawing became a way of communicating an existential “project” that would close the circle (the last fifteen years of his life) in the operation Difesa della Natura. A “defence” that goes beyond ecological and environmental problems and which concerns the anthropological defence of humanity: a defence of Man, creativity and human values. This operation is the main work that the German master left for the world as an echo of a potential social renaissance. It is an operation that has yet to be read, analyzed and understood in its entirety. In the performances, which took place in the 1950s and 1960s, ... a// things acquired form through thinking ... As such, thinking through metaphors is also considered as a plastic medium. This is an extreme position to be adopted by Beuys; the real transcendental position. And, last of all, discussions, the word: Beuys Voice. The need to talk, to communicate and to express oneself by whatever means found a full response in an entire life's work. For Beuys, being an artist meant living together with others, searching as a brotherhood for that elemental and deep understanding of what happens on Earth, because everything that happens in our world also happens inside us. \Ve can never stop talking to each other. And Beuys cannot stop reviving and continuing to live. And as it is for Beuys, so it should be for everyone who has decided to be an authentic man, i.e. a true artist. Beuys's voice accompanies him until death. He keeps the flame alive. And it is precisely in this respect that | wish Beuys's words to be the point of reference of our conversation in order to make an analysis of the contemporary world. If we make an in-depth examination of the final part of the Difesa della Natura discussion that the artist Marco Bagnoli and Joseph 501

Beuys held in Bolognano on May 13, 1984, we will be able to clear up all the doubts that are raised, the ambiguities and the tragedies that affect mankind. And (read eclectically, why not?) also the constant increase of oil that crushes every continent...

| would like to re-read with you this part of the discussion between Marco Bagnoli and Beuys. Marco Bagnoli: So then, we believe that we are of the tree. Moreover, the tree is perhaps the symbol of this conscience. So | then ask Beuys if this tree is conscious of us. If it is, it is the tree that plants us, materially, absorbing our conscience. If it is not, must it perhaps be that dead god who is reborn in our conscience? Joseph Beuys: Many thanks, Marco. | am perfectly in tune with what you have said. By doing this work we plant the trees and the trees plant us because we belong to each other and we have to live together. This happens within a process that is moving in two different directions at the same time. The tree is thus conscious of us in the same way that we are conscious of the tree. Therefore, it IS especially important to attempt to create or stimulate an interest in this kind of interdependence. If we show no respect for the author ity of the tree, or for the character or intelligence of the tree, we will find that the intelligence of the tree is so huge that it may be allowed to decide to make a call to communicate a message about the sad state of human beings. The tree will make its call to the animals, the mountains, the clouds and the rivers; it will decide to speak to the geological forces and, if humanity fails, nature will exact a terrible revenge, which will be the expression of the intelligence of nature and an attempt to return mankind to the light of reason through the instrument of violence. If men cannot avoid remaining prisoners of their own stupidity and if they refuse to acknowledge the intelligence of nature and to show the ability to establish a relationship of collaboration with her, then nature will resort to violence in order to oblige men to go down another route. We have reached a point where we must take a decision. We either take it or we do not. And if we do not take it, we will be obliged to deal with a series of enormous catastrophes that will affect every corner of the planet. Cosmic intelligence will turn on mankind. However, for a certain time we still have the opportunity to take a decision freely: to take a different direction from that of the past. We can still decide to align our intelligence with that of nature. I am very grateful for Marco Bagnoli's comments because | wanted to underline a very important aspect of our problem. Although his discourse might seem mystic, it speaks of reality. It is certainly not the kind of reality that this word normally refers to, in terms of positivist and materialist thought processes. Every time somebody refers to reality, | always ask, “but which kind of reality are you refer ring to? Which reality?” This is the question. Putting to one side the apocalyptic tone of the discourse in this last 502

section, which is really out of character for Beuys, the fundamental issue here is the conception of the idea of nature's intelligence, which man has a duty to acknowledge and respect. Nature's intelligence in fact corresponds to human intelligence. It is human intelligence (in nature man is equal to nature). It is clear, therefore, that in his creative activity and productive ability in all areas, man can never ignore the fact that he has his equivalent in nature. While we work in nature, nature works in our souls. This is without a doubt the deep meaning that permeates Beuys's work. It is especially true in actions such as Coyote, How to Explain Pictures to a Dead Hare and, above all, 7000 oaks and Difesa della Natura. This rereading also leads to specific reflections on the present, to the point of being able to answer the questions raised by Angela Vettese in her article “Erranti per l'Eurasia” of June 29, 2008, in no. 178 of Sole 24ore; where she says: “The question is to verify whether a category of thinking conceived of forty years ago can still be considered as a guide for understanding the superposition of cultures. Have we been able to predict in which direction the world would go? Was Beuys, at least, along with some other masters, able to foresee it? In the new multicultural art, does the sense of human solidarity really remain valid?” | find that Vettese's questions are interesting in order to carry out a more in-depth study of the problem of cultural progress, in order to make the importance of the words, actions, behaviour, symbols, metaphors and analogies of the German master understood, and always with a broad vision aimed at the improvement of man's future. That is why over the course of this conversation | will attempt to express myself through Beuys's “voice,” in order for Joseph Beuys's royal thinking to be understood once and for all. The conclusion of Vettese's article is rather in the style of Pontius Pilate, since it concludes thus: “Raising the issue of history, the relationship between continuity and discontinuity, represents an attempt to answer questions that do not permit definite words. So I ask myself: Jesus, where do we put him? It is necessary to open a debate on these issues with critics, artists and intellectuals from several disciplines. | believe that it is necessary to be more prudent and surefooted when dealing with certain issues because the simplistic and instrumental attitudes adopted by the media are damaging; they are an “evil” for humanity. Before quoting Beuys's name, show your wound.

following pages Joseph Beuys, Farm Cuming, Praslin, Seychelles, December 1980

Look Doctor Parcerisas, we are taking about, discussing and attempting to understand who Joseph Beuys is. We have devoted years of study, analysis and direct collaboration with the German master, always with tireless perseverance and profound humility in our objectives. The problem is genuinely an Italian one, Pilar, it is an Italian one. 503

SI deima

Beuys came to Italy for the first time as an artist on November 13, 1971, to Naples, invited by the great gallery owner Lucio Amelio. With the birth of the Transavantgarde movement he has been totally forgotten and betrayed by the same egocentrics, such as Achille Bonito Oliva, Bruno Corà and Germano Celant, who when he first came to Italy worshiped him and used him to make interviews or for personal interests. Over the last two years, having profited from art and other things and having exhausted all their business opportunities, powerful critics have been using Beuys's “name” to give a cultural sheen to their felted image (I employ Beuys's term) recycling old texts and appropriating the ideas of others, distributing yellowed photocopies and sad photomontages. However, it might also be the case that this revival is the result of the constant task of spreading Beuys's echo in Italy and around the world, a task which since he passed away we have carried out together with Antonio d'Avossa, the only Italian (and dare | say inter national) critic who has studied Beuys's work and thinking in-depth. And that makes me believe that “nothing has been lost” Notwithstanding this, everything that is happening creates confusion in the Italian art system. This ambiguity needs to be cleared up once and for all. Beuys really loved Italy. Italy does not love Beuys. And Italian critics and journalists lack ethics and professionalism, or rather, they do not have enough time to analyze the fundamental concepts of a man and artist who did not invent any method but who worked generously all his life in order to improve the existing conditions of society. He elaborated concepts that were the driving force of a new broader vision of art that was directly and closely connected to society's current problems.

Each movement and work must be read in the context of the historical time in which it was conceived and must be bravely reviewed on the basis of deep scientific analysis. Beuys not only sensed and anticipated the current crisis but also attempted to provide specific guidelines in order to improve society by using all the practical and theoretical means available. As such, in order to understand our current crisis in all its complexity and scope, we must adopt the broadest vision possible and see our situation in the context of human cultural evolution. We must displace our end-of-the-20th-century perspective towards a timeframe that encompasses thousands of years, from the notions of static social structures to the perception of models of dynamic transformation. From this perspective, the crisis seems like a process of transformation. It seems that the Chinese, who have had a profoundly dynamic world vision and an acute sense of history, have been very much aware of this profound connection between crisis and transformation. The word that they use for “crisis” is weiji, composed of two characters that mean “danger” and “opportunity”

The recurrent rhythm in cultural growth is linked to processes of 506

fluctuation that have been observed over the course of thousands of years and which have been considered as a fundamental and dynamic part of the universe. The ancient Chinese philosophers believed that all manifestations of reality were generated by the dynamic interaction between the two polar forces that they called yin and yang. In ancient Greece, Heraclites compared the world with an everliving fire, “with measures of it kindling, and measures going out!" Empedocles attributed the transformations of the universe to the ebb and flow of two complementary powers that he named “love” and “strife! The idea of an underlying rhythm has also been expressed by many other modern philosophers. According to Herbert Spencer, the universe goes through stages of “integration” and “undifferentiation! Moreover, we must not forget that Hegel saw human history as a spiral development that went from a form of unity to a stage of disunity, followed by reintegration on a higher plane. The reflection on the notion of fluctuating models is ttîerefore ex tremely useful for the study of evolution. Once the crucial point of vitality has been reached, civilizations lose cultural energy and enter into decline. An essential element of this decline is the loss of flex ibility. VWVhen social structures and behavioural models have become so rigid that they prevent society from adapting to transforming situations, society is no longer capable of continuing the creative process of cultural evolution and, therefore, goes downhill and will finally disintegrate. VVhile growing civilizations show endless variety and versatility, societies in decline show uniformity and a lack of creativity. The loss of flexibility in a society in decline is accompanied by a general loss of harmony amongst its elements, which inevitably leads to phenomena of discord and social disintegration. During the stormy process of the disintegration of society, its creativity (people's capacity to meet challenges) is not completely lost. Although the main trend has become rigid, clinging to fixed ideas and stereotypical behavioural models, creative minorities arrive on the scene that will continue the process of challenge-response. Our task forms part of this process. The dominant social institutions refuse to cede their guiding function to these new cultural forces. However, they inevitably continue to decline and destroy themselves while the creative minorities are able to turn some of the old elements into a new configuration. The process of cultural evolution will continue but under new circumstances and with new leading figures. This is the harsh reality that surrounds us and this is the specific reason why every movement, every word and every action of the German master must be analyzed in order for a correct interpretation to be made that is geared towards the future of the productive good of art and society. Having worth And it ess of

reached this point, and before continuing, | think that it is reading a short text in which Beuys recounts his childhood. is precisely in this tormented tale that the evolutionary prochis Royal Art was born. 507

Joseph Beuys: My relationship with my parents cannot be defined as close. On the contrary, | had to fend for myself from a young age. They were hard times and | felt a tremendous threat and oppression hanging over me. | certainly felt deeply rooted to the Lower Rhine region and to Kleve. Our neighbours included men who could be considered as role models. Jahnnes Sanders, for example, who had a great influence on me, ran a large laundry next to my par ents’ house that was bombed during the Second World War and, therefore, no longer exists. This laundry was a grey building with large chimneys. Sanders had a progressive spirit and was always experimenting with all kinds of devices. There were always interesting artefacts in that place, such as boilers and heaters, irons and spin dryers with enormous wheels. As a child, | was fascinated by all this; it seemed fantastic and grotesque at the same time. When titles such as “Guiding Crow” or “Genghis Khan's Tomb” appear, they can be interpreted as fundamentally psychological elements: they are early experiences, some of which are extraordinarily subjective dreams or creations that appear later on in life as coherently objective elements. As a child, these things are experienced in a completely illustrative way (at least that is what happened to me) in the sense that | represented anything that provided me with experience. | still recall that for years | behaved like a shepherd and carried a kind of “Eurasian walking stick," which later appeared in my works, and | always drove an imaginary flock that congregated around me. I was really a shepherd exploring everything that | saw around me. I felt very comfortable with this function, in which | attempted to invent experiences all the time. | began to become interested in plants and botany and | learned everything that could be learned in this area, noting everything down in notebooks. On occasional excursions with other children we made collections together that were open to the public. Naturally, all of this continued to be playful in nature. With old towels, sheets and fabric off cuts that we obtained from begging, we built large tents in which we exhibited our collected objects, including flies, reptiles, tadpoles, fishes, beetles, mice, rats, old mechanical devices and all kinds of technical tools; in short, everything that we had gathered together. But we also did a lot of

excavating, constructing a labyrinth of trenches with underground rooms. All of this took place in Kleve between 1925 and 1933. This tale, which on a first reading seems to be a simple narration of childhood memories, contains the substance that fed the structure of Beuys's philosophy, which leads us to the examination of some of the points of his journey: politics, economics and teaching. Let us analyze these initiatives in order to compare them with the current transitions.

The first of them dates back to 1967 with the founding of the Ger 508

man Student Party within the Dusseldorf Academy, where he was a lecturer in anatomy: despite the Academy Director's ban on holding “meetings for political purposes," Johannes Stùttgen, a student of Beuys at the time, wrote: “On June 22 at four o'clock in the afternoon, under the presidency of the lecturer Joseph Beuys, the inaugural assembly of the German Student Party has been held in Dusseldorf. The setting up of this party, the main objective of which is to guide people towards spiritual maturity, responds precisely to the need to fight the terrible threat of politics bereft of ideas, geared towards materialism and its corresponding stagnation. Consequently, it is necessary to discard issues that are inherent to a programme of this nature within the pernicious political structure. The party is working towards the necessary broadening of consciousness through spiritual and mental (and therefore progressive and human) methods. lt underlines the radical nature of its aspirations in respect of the fundamental renewal of all traditional forms of life and in man's thinking. A specific discussion will be, as Beuys says, essential yet only possible on a spiritual and artistic plane. Only in the battle of ideas do democracy and sincere human actions join forces. Utilitarian objectives, determined solely by economics, and by its egoism, must be superseded by the artistic demands of the time and, over the course of history, must be eliminated once and for all" Beuys reached this direct political commitment as a result of an inevitable convergence of interests: as an artist, his attention was focused above all on the evolutionary process of human liberty towards creativity. Furthermore, for Beuys it was important to under stand that the function of an artist consists of being useful to society and, therefore, the artist must be at the service of human needs in order to search for an improvement of life. This concept is made very clear in the famous discussion between Beuys and Kounellis which took place in October 1985 in Basel, organized by Jean-Christophe Amman, and in which Enzo Cucchi and Anselm Kiefer also took part. However, as a teacher, from 1961 he had been in contact with the growing political conscience of students and, to a certain extent, he had taken charge of it. The specific objectives of the German Student Party were: disarmament, a united Europe, the self-administration of law-culture-economics as autonomous entities, the development of new educational, teaching and research criteria, and a détente in the reciprocal dependency of East and West. More than forty years on, some of these problems remain highly topical. On March 2, 1970, Beuys founded the Organization for Non-Voters and Free Referendum.

lt must be stressed how atypical Beuys's commitment is in the world of politics. He refused to align himself with right or left, considering that unity in diversity, which for him represented a true 509

democratic milestone, could only be attained through a constant confrontation of different ideas and expressions. | feel that it is important to hear directly what Beuys said about the political concept of the left. Joseph Beuys: For me, being left wing today hardly means anything. The left in itself for me, does not represent any value. Thank God, following the division of the bourgeoisie, ideologies were also lost, i.e. the order of seats in parliament: left, right, centre. And that means that so-called parliamentarianism is called into question. And the left-wing concept is based on the order of seats.

On June 1, 1971, Beuys founded the Organization for Direct Democracy through Referendum. The organization is legally recognised as an association. Notwithstanding this, his intentions were far removed from party politics and were geared solely towards making people aware of their own creativity, based on the fact that all people are artists. However, that can only occur if people learn to cooperate, i.e. to work in harmony. This is how the real meaning of the word “organization” will become patent, i.e. the forming of the social body. The artistic discipline will become universal heritage: a free plastic art in a free democratic society. Joseph Beuys: / have reached the conclusion that the only possibility for man to do something is through art. And to do that | need an educational concept; | need a conception of the perceptive theory, and | must negotiate. As such, there are three things that are under the same umbrella. The educational concept refers to the fact that man is a creative being and it is very important for him to be conscious of this. In other words, it is necessary to create awareness of the fact that man is a creative and free being and that, for this reason, he inevitably has to behave in an authoritarian manner. The conception of perceptive theory confirms that only the creative man can change history and can use creativity in a revolutionary way. Returning to my educational concept, it would mean: ART = CREATIVITY =MAN'S FREEDOM. However, it is necessary to take into account the transformation of the social situation in the current state and how it has a repressive influence on humanity, which we could call most workers. All of this forms part of my educational concept and gears it towards politics. Let us tell people about the current situation and what we could do to discuss it and organize ourselves. In order to prepare people for this principle of free referendum and self-determination, we must organize it from a position of power, in order to be able to participate one day, for example, in the construction of democracy. All the executive power must come from the people and we teach them how to make it possible and attempt to organize it together. VVhen most men realize that there is only one route to change the law, for example, then it will simply be decided to carry out a refer endum. The people will say, “Ve have understood that it no longer 510

makes sense to delegate our voice to a man who, as a party politician, only aims to take the interests of the party seriously. Ve no longer wish to delegate men, we no longer wish for a representative or formal democracy; now we want self-determination and we wish to proceed through a referendum on the management of the means of production." Vhen the majority decides this, then it will have the validity of a law. Otherwise, those who hold up power lose their credibility as democrats. Those who are holding up power today wish for democracy, or that is what they say. So they are simply obliged to take very seriously the fact that the majority has created a law that they are transgressing. And the executive power of the people is thus exercised, the law is approved and transgression is no longer possible. In 1972 Beuys began to collaborate with Heinrich Béoll, the Nobel Prize winner, which led to the Free College project. This project led to the setting up of the Free International University (F1.U.), whose manifest was drawn up by Beuys and Béll. In addition to the problems associated with the central theme of creativity and the possibility of it being manifested in a truly democratic environment, the issue is raised of an institute that educates or re-educates people in art. However, it is necessary to observe greater sensitivity in respect of elements considered as destabilising or those of potential or actual social relevance. These include phenomena such as foreign immigration in industrialized (and therefore richer) countries, along with criminality, a true source of pain for contemporary society. Back in 1972 Beuys was already predicting two processes that today have spread all over the world. Let us read a fragment of the FI.U. manifest. The founders of the school search for stimulation amongst the for eigners who work here. This does not mean that it is a requirement for us to learn from them or for them to learn from us. Their cultural traditions and philosophy of life require an exchange of creativity, in addition to the simple concern of how art forms vary, geared towards comparing structures, formulas and verbal expressions of the material cornerstones of social life: law economics, science, religion and, therefore, towards the study and research of “democratic creativity” Democratic creativity is increasingly committed to the progress of bureaucracy, related to the savage proliferation of an international mass culture. Political creativity remains restricted to the simple delegation of decisions and power. The imposition of a cultural and economic dictatorship throughout the whole world, thanks to economic trusts, which are in continuous expansion, leads to a loss of articulation, of the ability to learn and of verbal expression. In the consumer soci ety, creativity, imagination and intelligence do not go hand in hand and they are prevented from expressing themselves freely, in such a way that they become harmful and dangerous (in opposition to democratic society) and find their expression in corrupt criminal activity. Criminality can arise from tedium, from an unarticulated crimi511

nality. The fact of seeing themselves reduced to consumer goods and of seeing democratic potential reduced to a periodical may also be considered as a rejection or abandonment of democratic creativity. Environmental contamination is advancing in parallel with the contamination of our interior world. Hope is publicly accused of being a UTOPIA or ILLUSION, and abandoned hope generates violence. At the university we research many forms of violence, which are not exclusively restricted to violence with weapons or physical force. As a forum for the comparison of political or social forms, the univer sity may establish a permanent seminar on social behaviour and its many expressions. This manifest still remains valid today in many aspects. Meanwhile, he found a practical application on the occasion of the Documenta VI in the summer of 1977. Members and sympathisers of the various sections of the FI.U. all over the world came together for the symposium entitled “100 Days of Permanent Conference” in order to discuss the hottest topics, which required an interdisciplinary approach. These discussions were structured into thirteen meetings that can be summarised as follows: 1. Meeting on the periphery. In other words, on the future of small countries and social sectors disadvantaged by political power. 2. Meeting on nuclear and alternative energy. The issue had acquired huge importance in West Germany, where for the first time the Greens had increased their number of follovwers, and would increase them further in the future. Alternative energy forms were proposed in which power did not remain concentrated in the hands of the state. 3. Meeting on the community. Reports on experiences of cooperation and self-determination. 4. First meeting on the media: manipulation. Discussions on the influence exercised by private interest groups and by the state. 5. Second meeting on the media: alternatives. Limited readership press, development of cable television and pirate radio stations, films that were independent of multinational distributors. 6. Human rights week. The Charter ‘77 was discussed, along with other problems related to man's right to freedom, both in the East and the West. 7. Meeting on urban decay and institutionalization. Discussions on the problems stemming from the capitalist system in cities and on the improvement of their institutions: prisons, mental hospitals, schools. 8. Meeting on immigration. This meeting was an offshoot of the first and focused on the need to foster trust, identity and work in the main emigrant-producing countries. 9. Meeting on Northern Ireland. An attempt was made to examine the real roots of the conflict. 10. Meeting on the world. Transformation models compared with repressive models around the world. 512

11. Meeting on violent behaviour. Focused above all on the climate of those years of lead. 12. Meeting on employment and unemployment. The causes of unemployment were analyzed within the dynamics of capitalism, which is exclusively profit-based. 13. Thirteenth meeting. An analysis of 100 days of discussions. Now it is possible to have a better understanding of the scope of action and the real penetrative capacity of the initiatives carried out by Beuys and his work groups. In each case he was motivated by an attempt to attain the greatest understanding possible of all the problem issues that continue to affect the civil life of contemporary man today, thirty years later. And you Pilar are very much aware that these problem issues approached in the “100 Days of Permanent Conference” were anaIyzed anew, in the light of current cireumstances, at the Beuys Event of the 52nd Venice Biennial, in which you took part as a speaker.

Throughout the 1970s, Beuys was tireless in his firm desire to reach as many people as possible: debates, conferences, colloquia, artistic and non-artistic manifestations and publications, according to how Beuys understood the concept of permanent conference, in the centre of which it was necessary to place man once and for all. In all of this, Beuys employed the structure and organization of the FIU, which finally seemed to bear fruit, presenting active groups in various cities in Germany, Italy, England, Ireland and the United States. Indeed, in 1978 the FI.U. published the document entitled Third Way Action (Promotional Initiative), which is of crucial impor tance in order to understand Beuys's thinking in terms of economics and finance. Meanwhile, the following year saw the publication of Beuys document entitled Appeal for an Alternative, which is worth studying. There are three basic points in this appeal: The first point sets out a general explanation of the symptoms of the crisis that had been present for some time in our society and which stemmed from capitalism and consumerism in their various guises. The second point of acute observation concerned the crisis of conscience and feelings. The third basic point focused on the fact that it was necessary to recover our own intellectual autonomy, providing us with an innovative and radical outlook on reality; this meant, above all, that through our ideas we should allow the revolution to take place within ourselves. The revolution of ideas is the only true one. In terms of social behaviour, this revolution involves evolution. From Beuys's perspective, man's real work is cultivation. Man is a gardener. 513

PP: Throughout his life, through his words and actions, Beuys at tempted to understand the needs of man in a context of caring collaboration. Yet even today they are not perceived in all their depth from a contemporary perspective. Not only did you listen in person to the master but also you contributed with him to denouncing all over the world the dangers that threaten man, and to disseminating the possibilities of social improvement. What is your view on things as they are today and what do you believe are the main causes of the crisis that Beuys predicted? L.D.D.: We are now experiencing on a global scale the crisis that Beuys predicted. For the first time we find ourselves faced with the very real threat of the extinction of the human species and of all forms of life on our planet. We have accumulated thousands upon thousands of nuclear bombs, enough to destroy the entire world many times over, and the arms race shows no sign of slowing down. The costs of this nuclear folly are mind boggling. The USA arms industry is working flat out. More than one hundred countries, mostly from the Third World, are involved in arms trafficking and the total number of sales of military material, both for nuclear and conventional wars, is greater than the gross domestic product of all but ten countries in the world. In parallel, more than 20 million people (mostly children) die of hunger every year and 500 million suffer from serious malnourishment. More than 40% of the world's population has no access to professional healthcare services. Despite this, the arms spending of developing countries more than triples the amount spent on healthcare, 35% of humanity has no drinking water while half of all scientists and engineers are involved in weapon production technology. Nuclear arms do not increase our security, as the military establishment would have us believe but rather they increase the likelihood of global destruction. The threat of nuclear war is the main danger currently facing humanity, but by no means is it the only one. Even if we rule out the catastrophe of a nuclear war, the global ecosystem and the evolution of life on earth are gravely threatened and a large-scale ecological disaster could occur. Overpopulation and industrial technology have contributed in many ways to a seriously damaged natural environment on which our lives utterly depend. Our health and welfare are thus seriously affected. Our main cities are blanketed by a layer of pallid suffocating pollution. Those of us who live in cities see it every day, in Los Angeles, Athens, Milan, Sydney and Rio de Janeiro. This pollution does not only affect people but also destroys ecosystems. It damages and kills plants and these alterations to plant life may lead to drastic transformations in the animal population that depends on it. In the world today, pollution is not only found in large urban centres but has spread throughout the earth's atmosphere and may have seriously negative effects on global climate. Meteorologists talk about atmospheric pollution that covers the entire country. 514

In addition to the contamination of the air, our health is also threatened by the water that we drink and the food that we eat, both contaminated by a large quantity of toxic chemical substances. This deterioration of our natural environment is accompanied by increasing health problems in people. While malnourishment and infectious diseases constitute the main causes of death in the Third World, industrialized countries suffer from chronic and degenerative diseases known as “the diseases of civilization” and the main causes of death are heart disease, cancer and strokes. On the psychological side, there is a proliferation of depression and schizophrenia. There are increasing indications of social disintegration, including an increase in violent crime, suicides amongst young people, accidents, alcoholism and drug abuse, and behavioural disorders. In tandem with these social pathologies we are observing economic anomalies that seem to create confusion amongst our most important economists and politicians. Galloping inflation, increasing unemployment and the grossly unjust distribution of profit and wealth have become structural aspects of most of national economies. The resulting consternation amongst the general public and their representatives becomes more acute due to the culpability stemming from the fact that energy and natural resources (the basic ingredients of all industrial activity) are rapidly disappearing. Faced with the triple threat of energy depletion, unemployment and inflation, our politicians no longer know what to do in order to solve it. They and the media argue about priorities (must we first tackle the energy crisis or should we focus on the fight against inflation?) without realizing that all these problems are just different aspects of a single crisis. Whether we are talking about cancer, crime, pollution, nuclear energy, inflation or the energy shortfall, the underlying dynamics of these problems are always the same.

following pages Joseph Beuys at Palazzo Durini, May 12, 1984

It is a highly revealing fact about our times that supposed experts in a range of disciplines are incapable of tackling the urgent problems that arise in their respective areas of expertise. Economists are incapable of understanding inflation, oncologists are uncertain about the causes of cancer, psychiatrists are unclear about schizophrenia and the police are powerless to prevent the increase in criminality. The list goes on. In times of great crisis such as these, we must read the transformations taking place within our natural and social environments and recognize the confluence of transitions, some of which are related to natural resources and others to cultural ideas and values. Some form part of periodical fluctuations while others are presented as rise and fall models. Each of these processes has a different duration or frequency but they all share periods of transition that are currently converging. Amongst these transitions there are three that have shaken the foundations of our lives, our social, economic and political system. 515

The first transitionis also the deepest and is due to the slow decline of patriarchy. Its period of validity has lasted at least three thousand years. It IS a power that has never been contested by history, based on doctrines that have been universally accepted to the point where they seem like natural laws. The feminist movement has been one of the strongest cultural trends of our time and will always have a profound effect on future evolution, whether positive or negative. The second transition is the important influence that the decline of fossil fuels has had on our lives. The present time is the solar age, fed by the renewable energy with which the sun provides us. This is a profound transformation that will involve radical changes to our economic and political systems. The third transition is related to cultural values. It involves what is termed today as “change of paradigm.” This means a profound change in terms of ideas, perceptions and in the values that constitute a particular vision of reality. The paradigm that is currently changing has dominated our culture for hundreds of years, during which time it has embodied our modern Western civilization and has had a significant influence on the rest of the world. This paradigm encompasses a series of ideas and values that can be clearly distinguished from those of the Middle Ages; values that have been associated with several trends in Western culture, including the scientific revolution, the Enlightenment and the industrial revolution. They encompass faith in the scientific method as the only valid approach to conscience; the view of the universe as a mechanical system composed of basic material parts; the view of the life in society as a competitive struggle for existence; faith in material and unlimited progress that is attained through economic and technological growth. Over the last few decades, it has been shown that all of these values are affected by serious limitations and require a radical review. As an artist and somebody capable of predicting human problems, Beuys understood that the perspective of cultural evolution must now undergo the paradigmatic change of a much vaster process, a surprisingly regular fluctuation of value systems that can be found throughout Western civilization in respect of other cultures. In this respect, let us recall his two performances: Eurasia. 34th Movement of the Siberian Symphony, 14 and 15 October 1966, Gallery 101, Copenhagen, Eurasienstab 82 min. Fluxorum organum, February 10, 1967, St. Stephan Gallery, Vienna. Beuys saw in the Earth's embrace the only source of knowledge

and truth; the Earth as the “mother” that bore children and stepchildren, saints and demons, all her children who must be loved and vho must live together in a free and caring collaboration, in human understanding and respect; the Earth as redemption. Man and nature with a united spirit will build a new world. This important passage by Beuys is from the work entitled From the 518

specific Utopia to the Utopia of the Earth. VVhen referring to Utopia in terms of Beuys (I also refer to Cecilia Casorati in the text of the Eurasia catalogue, Dissolvenze geografiche dell'arte, Skira, Milan 2008), it is necessary to be very prudent, to study and gain a deep understanding of the meaning that the Ger man master gave to the word “Utopia” | wonder why, when exhibitions are organized, there are no conferences and debates on issues that are so interesting that they could lead to compared analyses with a pedagogical application, a fundamental point in a civilised country? Beuys senses that man's crisis is not only a crisis of individuals, governments or social institutions but rather a transition of planetary dimensions. It is a crisis that we suffer as individuals, as a society and as a universal ecosystem. Its Living Sculpture represents a possibility for the spiritual rebirth of man through which a true change will come about; a sculpture, living social plastic art made up of men of different races, origins, religions, and from different social, economic, political and cultural strata, united by a free and caring collaboration. PP: As | understand it, having devoted a large part of his life to thinking up, creating and keeping alive organizations that might seem to be marked by political intentions, Beuys in fact managed to free himself completely of political ideas and focus on the true human dimension of civil existence in the economic and cultural environment, i.e., he gave preference to the pedagogical system. | would like to talk to you about this twin vision of Beuys, which today more than ever is of global interest. L.D.D.:This observation is very interesting and it reminds me exactly of Beuys's “voice” in a particularly clarifying debate that took place in Vienna in 1983. It is recounted in Caroline Tisdall's Guggenheim catalogue. Beuys: Some concepts and observations on the concept of politics. I have placed a question mark against the concept of politics because it has been reinforced in all of man's productive areas in what I have termed as “felting.” My concepts regarding the society of the future, such as self-administration, real democracy, a new system of capital and credit for the economy, cannot be divided in terms of content. And, on the other hand, | state that there are concepts that are far removed from the truth, such as political culture. A term like this should not even exist. It suggests that the state should exercise culture, something which it effectively does since it has created schools, which are therefore state companies ... Economic politics is also mentioned, another meaningless concept since the interests of the state become false, in terms of economics, due to the fact that the state becomes

a businessman.

VVe

therefore have a new felting factor, and this is an example in which 519

concepts are seen to be divided ... We have, on the one hand, the life of the spirit and, on the other hand, that of the economy. In both areas politics is wholly incompetent. The appropriate field for politics should be that of a state that guarantees the maintenance of its legislative, executive and judicial powers. If this occurred and the state restricted itself to defending and exercising the acquired rights of democratic man, everything would go well. Then it would be possible to begin to work with this concept. One could say, “this is the political institution, of state interest, this is the free life of the spirit that administrates itself and here there is still a principal of self administration, in a caring economy that only works for the common good.” ... | would like to repeat the reason why | am interested in dealing with the concept of politics and in defending a radical thesis, in other words, that it should not exist; the concept of politics is closely linked to that of the bourgeoisie. And we are still living in an age that stems directiy from the French Revolution, i.e. from the revolution of the bourgeoisie, for whom the concept of politics is no doubt alien. Yet this is the age that we want to end. VVe do not want the bourgeoisie; we want Man. We want new Man. Classless Man! That is my concept of humanity. These are the concepts that Beuys really tackled: economics and culture, or rather, a correct approach to economics through truly educational action. Beuys: / have an ever stronger belief that today's problem is to be found in economics rather than in culture, i.e. in the productive area involving the manufacture, distribution and consumption of goods. And the cultural environment must be integrated organically within this productive circuit. However, unfortunately, economics and cul ture today are completely separated from each other. Therefore, in Beuys's thinking, economics and culture go hand in hand, in that man's productive activity and capacity are basically concerned with culture. Likewise, all the aspects involved in economics, in the organization and functioning of its structures, should not be considered as an area reserved for experts but rather they should be linked to people's lives and become universal cultural assets. The FI.U. document entitled Third Way Action - Promotional Initiative, which | have already mentioned and which you, Doctor Parcerisas, have included in this exhibition and have translated into Catalan, is a twenty-page publication that tackles a range of issues concerned with work and economics. This little red book, published in 1978, has been translated into several languages. The work deals with various specific aspects of the “new economy! Two basic elements must be taken into account regarding Beuys's concept. First of all, Beuys does not view current economics as a monster which has become a giant, whose baneful nature has grown over the course of the centuries. On the contrary, the most evident as520

pect of contemporary economics, according to Beuys, is that it cultivates man's productive ability not only for himself but also, and especially, in order to satisfy the needs of others. And this is a basic conquest on the road towards universal brotherhood. However, in order for that to occur it is first necessary to remove old concepts since they have nothing to do with the novelty of the world economy. This is why he criticises the concepts of property, salary and profit, which have no place in the economy of abilities. And, above all, this is the reason for the need to change the function that Money continues to fulfil. For Beuys, money must be considered as a means of exchange, referring to the old barter economy; it does not constitute an economic value but rather it is a document of rights and obligations: on the one hand, it enables man to act as a consumer and, on the other hand, it obliges him to fulfil his duty as a producer, i.e. to work for the good of his brothers and sisters. This is the second interesting element of Beuys's “new economy! It is truly extraordinary how, when describing his theory of money, Beuys refers constantly to organicimages. Terms such as “flux/ “or gans,' “central banking” and “circulation” give the theory real and very natural connotations. In fact, we might say that they make it equivalent, for humanity, to the circulation of blood through man's body; in the same way that blood must flow fluidly and above all uniformly through man's veins and arteries, Money must flow through the channels of production, distribution or consumption without accumulating in an inorganic way at any point, which would place the survival of other organs in danger. Meanwhile, all the work that Beuys carried out in the most wide-ranging of fields refers us back to a universal concept that can be summarizsed with a question: in the structuring of his creativity in many areas that are of interest to him, why should man refer to principles that are completely alien to him (like a body with spiritual, physical and mental powers) and therefore alien to natural reality itself? Perhaps it is true that Beuys's magic as a man stems precisely from his ability to remove the superfluous, in all areas, from the manifestations of human expressiveness, since the superfluous constitutes a dangerous obstacle along the road to reconstructing the true image of the individual. In this respect, the place that seemed most natural to Beuys, at least at the beginning, in order to make his voice heard was the Academy of Fine Arts. As we already know he took up a teaching post in Monumental sculpture there in 1961 and taught until 1972. This is Klaus Staek's portrait of Beuys as a teacher: “For an entire generation of young artists, Joseph Beuys was a very strict teacher, but also a very patient one. In the same way that he was capable of turning the simple things of daily life into part of his art, he always attached more importance to man than to the machine. To sum up, he trusted the imagination and latent possibilities in each individual more than laboratories and machines 521

That does not mean that equipped with sophisticated mechanisms. s show that the construction many his technique; he was hostile to USA, after visthe to trip first our during contrary was true. In 1974, workshops of of series endless an iting Minneapolis and attending we reached techniques, modern all kinds that showed off the most display and on had students the rather discouraging works that the best tools the with Beuys spontaneously exclaimed: ‘Even here, first thing The that one could imagine, nothing has been achieved. that | would do is hand out some potato peelers and a piece of wood to see what can be made of them." This example shows how seriously Beuys took his teaching function, first of all because he felt responsible for his students, to whom he undoubtedly wished to transmit something that enabled them to make sense of their present and future lives, and also because he saw pedagogical action as a highly important aspect of the expression of life and the spirit. At such a historic moment as the present time from a pedagogical point of view in schools and universities, it is good to discover the vivid and vital vision that Beuys had of teaching. Beuys: The teacherstudent relationship must overcome the idea that the one who knows is the teacher and that the student must simply listen. lt should not be taken for granted that the student is less able than the teacher. That is why the teaching-learning relationship must be completely open and constantly reversible. That effectively means doing away with learning and teaching as institutionalized behaviours. In an interdisciplinary school, the teaching and learning system must involve give and take because many young people today have a more intense relationship than many teachers with socio-political problems in particular. Young people are born with the need to ask political questions and all too often teachers prevent them from doing so. This is especially true for those who persist in their institutionalized privileges and wish to take all decisions ex cathedra. The relationship between Beuys and the Dusseldorf Academy became irreconcilable in 1971 as a consequence of a dispute concerning numerus clausus. Beuys considered this legal provision unjust, above all concerning the selective criteria applied in the admission process. Furthermore, the underlying idea is that schools are not created for those who already know how to do everything but rather for those who need the greatest amount of help in order to learn. That is why Beuys made clear his intention to accept 142 students in his class who had not been admitted, despite the fact that the Education Minister, Rau, had forbidden this in a letter to the Director of the Academy, E.Trier.

Beuys: This did not mean that any student could turn up at my class 522

as they saw fit, as it has often been misunderstood. My students were thoroughly tested in order to see whether studying at the Art Academy might be valid for their lives. For me, the current admission policy based on a student's drawing portfolio is no longer valid. My experience with this selection process has been really disappointing. The most interesting students that | have had have not been so much those who presented a wonderful portfolio but rather those who were rejectedì. If | did not have this progressive idea regarding the principles of school, education, university, culture, creativity and freedom, | could not justify my position. Since | defend this idea | intend to admit students with no restrictions. And since It is my responsibility, | will make an effort to find a new teaching method and suitable advice in order to address the current unsatisfactory situation. so on October 15, 1971, Beuys occupied the offices of the Academy to demand a meeting with Minister Rau in order to solve the admission issue: sixteen students had accepted Beuys offer to enter his group. On October 21, he received written confirmation from the minister that the sixteen students could be admitted in the winter semester. Beuys understood that is was necessary to build a new structure that offered students a real service, placing them in contact with more authentic and, above all, more useful realities in order to help them to mature. This is how the Project model for a free university came about, which was implemented the following year, as | have said, with the founding of the FI.U. Let us look what Beuys says: Beuys: The political battle for the principle of a free university. Most university applications today are restricted by the fact that no minimum financial provisions are put in place for those who study. As a result of this unfavourable situation, students find themselves obliged to obtain the financial means to pay for their education through extra or temporary work during the semester or holidays, when they should be studying or relaxing. lt is necessary to free them from these circumstances. If students really had the financial means to meet the material needs of their studies, this would simply represent the fulfilment of their basic right to instruction. Everyone who studies is also working for society, as this enables them to put into practice the abilities related to their profession. The non-remuneration of work referred to as “study” reflects a concept of society since it denies the fulfilment of an individuals basic right to intellectual development, with equal opportunities. And the privileges of a certain sector of society continue to be inherited. People must be informed and decide with their direct vote the amount of public capital (the people's income) that must be assigned to finance education. As such, laws would guarantee students their studies and the financial means necessary for their upkeep during their period of training; the idea of educational funds for students must be initially linked to a “Free College," i.e. the universities must be fi523

nanced with amounts that meet the students’ educational needs: 1. Up-keep, clothing, accommodation. 2. Teaching staff salaries. 3. Up-keep and improvement of top class academic institutions. 4. The student and teaching bodies will determine the amount corresponding to point 3. 5. Certain artistic or scientific projects will be financed through surplus amounts. The free university will guarantee equal rights in state examinations and complementary optional studies (it is planned to hire free teaching staff and not civil servants). The analogies between this project and that of studying a more solid economic system are clear and it is surprising to see to what extent, more than forty years on, these proposals and pedagogical concepts were ahead of their time and have still not been applied in Italy or in many other countries. In 1972 Beuys was in Kassel with his Information Office of the Organisation for Direct Democracy. On his return to DUsseldorf he found himself clashing once again with the firm decision of Minister Rau to prevent him from admitting students to his class who had been rejected by other teaching staff. As a response, on October 10, 1972, Beuys and fifty-four students occupied the secretary's office of the Academy. Nobody behaved badly or caused any damage. The minister responded by sacking Beuys on the spot. He remained in the secretary's office until the evening of October 13. Over the course of these days, hundreds of students continued to demonstrate, showing their disagreement. The police intervened to re-establish order. Beuys placed the matter in the hands of lawyers and the long case concluded on April 7 1978. The Supreme Court of Kassel declared that Beuys's dismissal from his post of lecturer at the Academy of Fine Arts of Dusseldorf by the Ministry of Education of the North Westphalia Rhineland region must be considered legal. However, Beuys's took his greatest satisfaction from the FI.U,, “his” school, where he managed to create an image that he always understood as creativity: or at least freedom.

so for Beuys the only way out was to carry out, from an organic viewpoint, a process of transformation, of evolutionary development, which broadened the various cognitive concepts that remained in the mindset of Western man. As such, his discourse mainly focused on the evolutionary problem that is always progress and never regression. Joseph Beuys was capable of rekindling the passion for social and humanitarian analysis, for restoring importance and dignity to the function of analysing current change, of foreseeing the decline that man has caused in nature and against nature. 524

Beuys once said to me: /t js not true that the artist only manages to speak after death. But perhaps it is true that the dead artist is better than the living artist. Who is to Judge? | can and will say that we are all extremely fortunate that Beuys spoke out while he was alive. We are very fortunate that he lived. Otherwise we would have had one gardener less. But above all vve vould have had one man less. And we need men. And not just us, nature also needs them. Doctor Parcerisas, | am grateful for the chance you have given me to disseminate once again Beuys's voice to the world and | would like to conclude this conversation with a phrase in honour of my master: Throughout the third millennium, in art and beyond art, the roots of Beuys's thinking will always be present. As long as a single plant and a single man exist on the planet Earth, the Royal Art of Joseph Beuys will survive. (from Joseph Beuys Diary of Seychelles, Fundaciò Caixa, Girona 2009. On the occasion of the exhibition under the same name // Giardino di Beuys has been created in the botanical gardens of Parc Roig in Costa Brava, 24 March 2009)

525

TENTH READING Pierre Restany interviews Joseph Beuys Pierre Restany: Perhaps you could say something about your show at the Guggenheim Museum? Joseph Beuys: On that occasion it was like seeing another artists show. | thought: “He was a very important man in those times and, nevertheless, he made very important things." But on that day |was not prepared to see all his things again. So | had, in a way, a kind of aversion—all that in the morning. And | had an ache in the pit of my stomach. So then | went to this opening there and there was a tremendous lot of people; then somebody brought me a long speech. | was standing in the midst of the people and | felt bad; | intended to vomit and so | went out. | saw Kasper Koenig and | said to him “Can you perhaps give me a cigarette?” So he tried to give me a cigarette, but | did not see it—/ just passed out.

PR.: So you had un aversion to the past? Well, | must tell you something Josef and that is that over the past few months you have had a lot of, let us say, “retrospective situations” to assume. You have had the big show at the Guggenheim in New York, you have these yearly commemorations and you also now have this room at Venice: that is a lot of commemoration of the past, do you not think so? J.B.: Yes, | agree. But let us start with this Venice piece: here | think I followed exactly the theme of that exposition. This exhibition was dedicated to that time—so | followed that period and thought about which principle in it, from the age of seventeen until now, was for me the most important action or general impulse in my art activity. So then | decided to show the history of the lecture actions where the principles, the structures and the ideas of organizations and a wider understanding of art being related to the social problems, could appear as a kind of documentation. So | showed the tools, the instruments and the blackboards as a kind of documentation of such a wider understanding of art asbeing related to such fields, such powerfields of the social order. This is the most important principle: the money problem in society, capital. And so l called this historical piece “capital.” PR.: Why is there that piano? J.B.: Because this piano often played an important role in making sounds and, very often, also a kind of music during such performances. Especially in the beginning when | started to work with symbols on blackboards; and in the beginning their existence played a very important role. So in a way you are right: over the past two or three years | have had a lot of retrospective stuff to do. But mostly it was not my intention but the intention of the organizers who all 526

Joseph Beuys with his students at the Dusseldorf Fine Arts Academy, 1977

527

wanted such a kind of retrospective. For instance, that was also the idea ofTom Messer—not to show only one work done especially for the Guggenheim—he wanted to have a kind of history of my own work to show in the United States. PR.: And on the Guggenheim | would like to say something: apart from the historical dimension, everybody was impressed by the way you used the museum space; and that was also part of the work of art. If you did not consider the “graphic part, if you only considered the pieces, the way you put and distributed the pieces into the Guggenheim, it becomes a sort of whole, entire piece. And | think that this is important. When you look, for example at the Tram stop from the top, it is not only a piece, it is a kind of quotation mark which introduces all the museum space. And, well, | think that work is quite good. More than these Kinds of “view” that you did in the Guggenheim | was also, | must say, impressed by the didactic kind of dimension of some pieces. | had already seen the “sledges” piece in another place: but with the perspective of the Guggenheim it was very evident. And | think that kind of evidential quotation was quite an important thing. And that maybe goes beyond the pure, let us say, “retrospective” dimension of this kind of thing. | am not assuming it was a retrospective of yours, you see? J.B.: Yes, that is right. | had to work with this retrospective character of my pieces in another way to show that the piece, that all the pieces, from the beginning onwards towards the last piece, which was dated, | think 1977 or so, to show, as | say, the whole thing like a kind of machine. It works together, it has even now a kind of importance also for a wider understanding of art—that | did not shift away from art to do politics, but for me the idea of art is the most important revolutionary idea. That for me was a kind of foundation for doing such a thing in the Guggenheim. It was rather like a beehive, you know, where everything has a functional interdependency. PR.: Because the big danger of a show like that in the Guggenheim was for you to be used as, let us say, a cultural “value” and be taken as, let us say, a kind of director, a kind of leading cultural character. | think that the show very alive; it was living because, as | said before, by looking at it well, the whole show was one piece and it is not so easy, you know, to do that: to really realize that. It was one global piece of Beuys, it was a kind of steady performance. It was not so in Venice. Venice was not absolutely the same kind of event. Of course the dimension was not the same, but it was much in that sense, programmatic or didactic—and also a little rhetorical. But it may be that all these kinds of pseudo-historical shows at Venice are a little rhetorical: | think you were just part of the Venetian rhetoric. I will tell you something which is also quite important. Everybody talks about your social theory, everybody also has this feeling that what you always wanted to do is to develop and outline social dimension and social energy and to link them to objects, link them to 528

installations, link them to your work; but the most important thing for me is the quantity of energy that you bring to your own human action. Let us talk about the early times. Do you remember when you did this Happening when you stayed in a Yoga position for a long time? J.B.: For twenty four hours, in fact. PR.: So, already when you used your body as a part of your piece you stressed this kind of analytical power. You have also spent a lot, and have dedicated a lot of time to your university, your free univerSity, to your .... J.B.: ... organization for direct democracy? PR.: Exactly. To the political parties you made, or non—political or super—or hyper—or parapolitical kinds of parties. And now you are recognised as a master. There is maybe a kind of conrasted dimension of youself; on the one hand you have this energy which you have dedicated to sustaining the social dimension of your work and, on the other hand, we find that you are virtually consecrated as an old master: you know, in a purely artistic way, an aesthetic way. ls there not something of a contrast here? J.B.: No, there is no contrast. Perhaps it gets more and more clear that this so-called “social sculpture” was an ideal means for developing a wider understanding of art, and a logical understanding of art and an understanding of art which could change the systems, the repressive systems in the east and the west: and this is already at work even in the drawings from 1960 or 1955. | think this kind of what people often call the “mythology” of the thing is perhaps a kind of general substance in the stock. Let us say that there is at last no longer a kind of contradiction, rather a kind of complicated, integrated trial for working out what that which | call the “goal” of art should be: to transform the social order, to overcome the capitalistic system. At least this was one way: | told the people: “This blackboard construction there shows in its structure how we can overcome the capitalistic systems in the world—in both the east and the west—vwithin seven years.” So they said, “What! This is ow to overcome the democratic systems in seven years, and it is all on this blackboard?” And now—here is my watch: within seven years from now this system will be finished.

Sarenco: Tell me, what are the reasons for your new union, a socialeconomic union, with Andy Warhol, the star of Pop art? It seems to me that your own work is a very long way from the true idea of Pop. J.B.: Yes, that is right; quite correct. And the methodology, the method of Andy Warhol is radically different to mine. But | would not restrict the idea of Andy Warhol only to that of Pop art. He has 529

his own philosophy and the more | come to know this complicated character of Andy Warhol, and this extremely simple character of Andy Warhol—which already is a kind of contradiction—the more / can also see him with a kind of wider interest. So | cannot restrict myself to saying of Andy Warhol that he is only a representative of Pop art. He has a kind of vision which is very complicated. He tries to eliminate everything and he tries to bring everything to a kind of zero point, you know, to a kind of almost being deaf to everything. And perhaps he has a spiritual idea also of a kind of resurrection, because in a way he is almost a religious person. The more | speak with him the more | see in him a kind of religious impulse, which comes very often out of his speech. Nevertheless he plays the role of a very intricate “interviewer,” for instance in Italy, when he only works with contradictions and all those things. Anyway, the best part of all this is that he is a friend of mine. That is the most impor tant thing.

PR.: But you are right, | think, to say to Sarenco that Warhol is not just a star of Pop art. Warhol is also interesting because—do not forget— he is also the leader of a whole organization, and this organization not only exists to create personalities, but it also exists to produce activities: and those activities—vwhich can be films or magazines—create a kind of very strong and acid information about present times. He is a producer of critical information. And Pop art is not that; in a sense it is a glorification of the consumer society. Everyone says now that there was some element of criticism in it, but this is not true. Pop art accepted the consumer society, because Pop artists wanted to use its rich iconography. But in Warhol there was, surely, this desire for free activity, for destructiveness, which is extremely important. | think you made that point. Do you feel in some way involved in going beyond your social activity so as to create, perhaps, new social kinds of entities and organisms as you did before? J.B.: No. Since my last term in university | have been obliged to do an important part of my work within the ecological movement, which in Germany is called the Green Party. And that | have to do at least until the next Federal election campaign. Pierre Restany: Are you going to be a candidate? Joseph Beuys: Perhaps | will be a candidate; one person can run for office. But this is dependent on the wishes of the base of the movement. | cannot say to the people: ‘| will do it," or “I must do it." No, the people make the decisions about who will do this work. But, nevertheless, whoever will be elected, my work is to struggle for this social movement, this Green Party. So my immediate work is directed towards this aim: to reach and Jump over the 5% hurdle, as in France.

PR.: Well, do you think that this Green movement has good chances? We have been surprised by the result of the provincial elections. Do you think the general awareness is growing? J.B.: Yes, the awareness is growing. | mean to say, the awareness 530

of the people grows towards having such goals as the Greens have in mind: the necessity to change the social order, to come to new structures for culture, for democracy and economy. So one can already see that a lot of people are involved in supporting such a stream in society. In two provincial parliaments, in the south and in the north, we almost managed to get near the 5% hurdle: we reached, though, only 3%. But all the same 3% is a lot, especially in this area where the great majority of the people is greatly involved in industrial labour. Here in northern Westphalia, more

than in the

south, there exist particular workers’ problems. So we have reached 300,000 people who voted for the green partv—and that is an immense quantity. So we hope that we can make the next progress in the election campaign in October. But whether or not we jump over or stay behind the 5% this work, for me, and for all of us, seems to be absolutely necessary, and we will not give in with this work even IfWwe do not get over the percentage hurdle. Because | feel that this Is a very, very important work to do. It is necessary to work against the ruling block. Every political party in Germany, from the Social Democrats

to the Liberals and the Christian Democrats,

basically

do nothing other than to make up just one block: every party wishes to follow the same principles—every party! So we have to struggle against the ruling block. The only real opposition consists in this Green movement. PR.: one, and you say,

But do you think that your contribution should be a “classical” | mean a classical militancy, the organization of conferences meeting people and canvassing for votes, or do you think that can have a special “action” that you can build a special, let us artistic and political side in the elections?

J.B.: Yes, we have already tried to find new activities in the streets: some kind of actions. VVe have done this, in the past and we will also do it in the future. But the most important thing is to go into the universities and to spell out very clearly, and from a scientific point of view, the theory of the thing. So that also the people with a very materialistic understanding of science, and who have a need for finding a rationalization of the thing and a clear analysis of the thing, may know more and more that this theory which works within the Green movement—more clear or less clear in this part of the Green movement, more or less in other parts—that this theory becomes more and more clearly the only possible available theory for transforming the social order. So very recently, in the past three weeks, | invited here an important person from East Germany to make clear just what his criticism of communist thinking is; and | made clear what my criticism is of Western private capitalism. It became clear that we had in common the same characteristic principles of innovation and of working with ideas and with art and creativity. So let us say that there are the same ideas for living for everybody, and that is the starting point for every other problem in this society. You see? The idea of freedom, the idea of art, the idea of self-determination, 531

the idea of creativity: these are the points from which we start, you know. This is, for all of us, the organic starting point. And so we showed very clearly the difference between Marxist thought and the new thought; we showed how we are trying to draw away from the bad positions within Marxist thought. And in this way we came to a new kind of philosophy. PR.: You know what you say is very interesting because it is linked to your own history. You appeared on the scene—and not only on the artistic scene, as you said, but also on the socio-political scene— when, let us say, all the principles of the Judeo-Christian civilization started to go down, started to be, you know, less efficient. And that is very important because in that sense Marxism has become just another ideology of power and nothing else. Do not forget that we were formed in a kind of, let us say, schematic triangle. All our civilization was based on a monotheistic basis which was a moralistic basis with two parameters. One of these was “Give love on the outside” which was Marxism, and the other which was psychoanalysis and Freud, turned “inside” and became the exploration of our inner being. Ve have the illusion that we can pass from the first revolution across to the second revolution and form, with these two together with the monotheistic base, a kind of triangle. Do you see what | mean? But it is not in fact something that we can use because we can see that Marxism has become not only Marxism but Leninism, Maoism; that psychoanalysis has gone from Freud to Jung, from Jung to Wilhelm Reich, from Wilhelm Reich to Lacan. And, you know, we have this feeling that, as you say, everything is reduced to the same kind of common denominator, which is power. And | think you gave a very good criticism of that. Do you think, by the way, that you could now, or in the near future, imagine for example a show of Beuys dedicated to this kind of Green movement, with your works and things like that? Do you think that you could illustrate—vwith your own social sculptural means—this Green movement? J.B.: Yes, you are right; it is possible, in principle it is possible. And, yes, that is right—all that stuff you illustratedjust now about the tendency of cultural personalities from Freud and Marx to Wilhelm Reich to belong to a kink of understanding of culture which has still to get a new point of vision analysed. There, instead, you see that everything has the same kind of root of evil in it. Freud also seemed to be a very important researcher into mankind's soul and spirit—in a way as a kind of materialistic scientist. He built up the other part of Marxist thought. So in fact | see, not so much a contradiction between Freud and Marx, as two personalities working principly in the same direction: because both personalities based themselves on the materialist understanding of so-called natural science, the historical materialistic view. All this seems to me the reduction of the anthropos, of the idea of the anthropos: to eliminate everything to the point where, you know, the body is a problem: both the in532

dividual body and the incarnated body of the people. They look, in truth, more to the body and they speak of the body as though it had some part of a spirit in it but they are unable to bring themselves to the view, common even in Plato's time, which was that the human personality consisted of a spirit, a soul and a body. So the tendeny with time has been to see the body as a mere incorporation of biological substance. Because every spiritual idea was discarded and was called “irrational.” But they yet had to find just what are these dimensions of which the ancient philosophers. like Plato, and the older cultures were speaking about. It is necessary to avoid a kind of regression to such an old culture, vet to go towards a new level of consciousness. But we have to accept the consequences of all these reductions to a biological view of mankind‘ life, to a materialization of mankind‘ life, the so-called exact natural-science ideology, the whole materialistic view of the world. We have to come up with other realities, you know. And for me it is the same: looking at the world one can see that the world consists of many more realities than a materialistic person can allow. The restrictive view, which insists that everything has to be reasoned out and has to be proven only by materialistic criteria, does not give the whole spectrum of so-called reality. So | always begin my informational lectures and my political forums with the problem: which reality are we speaking about? Because there are a number of very different realities. And I# we speak about organization, we are in fact speaking on another level of reality than if we are speaking of cultural innovation; and when we speak about the ideas of freedom and of consciousness in preparation for the next centuryr—which implies the question of what will be the next step of culture in the next centurvr—then we have to speak about many more levels of reality than the materialistic scientist is involved with. PR.: But do you not think that now we are reaching a moment which is very important? It is the end of the century and it is also the end of the millenium, we are, you know, coming very near the end of the year two thousand. This idea of reducing man to the status of a kind of materialistic out-of-control body plus mind—vwhich is the idea of Marxist philosophy and the idea of orthodox Freudianism—is already of the past and it does not work anymore. And it is not only you and me who have this kind of awareness: it is a very common kind of feeling. And you know, when we say that the big fear of the vear 2000 will be the atom bomb, it isfor mejust a kind of metaphore. It is only the projection of a mass-collective paranoia, just as the collective fear of the year 1000 was the plague. It is, then, more this idea that, in a certain way, there is a big pollution of our minds which is the fear of the common people. | think that is something we will have to deal with. And, of course, perhaps you can be efficient in that sense. | think you might be able to develop yourself and to live in a world. Sometimes the individual biography is not purely casual. You have, maybe, two objective chances in your life: to have been old eneough to have experienced the Second World War, and 533

not old enough to die before the end of this Judeo-Christian ideological system. And | think it is that which gives, really, the social impact of your work. And when you talk about social structure and social theory and things like that it is, perhaps, because you feel in vourself, organically, the real dimension of your own times: | think

that is quite important. It is a pity, for instance, that Yves Klein died so soon because he could have given another kind of solution and another kind of approach. But he had the same kind of approach that you have: that the proper dimension of time must be that of your own times. If you had born at the beginning of the century you would have been another Beuys, in many ways. J.B.: Yes; and | work in continuity and | try really and truly to solve this problem. And so this is the reason | cannot die before the problem is touched and the first results are to be seen from the people: then | can die. PR.: A very important thing to understand is just why the French avant-guard people, in let us say the turning point of the 1950s and 1960s, were without any moral meeting point or solidariety with other people in Europe, and especially in Germany and Italy. | will tell you why. The situation in Paris at that time was very strong. Paris was living in an organized mythical illusion for market and values. At that time Paris ignored the American school because they wanted to control the open market. So the so-called school of Paris was over-vwhelming: you had big galleries, a kind of mafta of galleries, crities and museum directors. So what the artists had to do was to express themselves against Paris and to struggle with this their own city, because their own operational environment was already a big part of their own world. And they had to dedicate a lot of things: look, for example, at the scandalous behaviour into which Yves Klein was forced when he was alive. He always had to create scandals to explain himself, and he lost a lot of time that way. And you know the power of the reactionary art scene in Paris was so strong that of course those people used up a lot of energy. People like Christo or Arman decided to go to America because it was easier: but the people who remained in Paris were of course absolutely concerned to affirm themselves against Paris in Paris. And that is a part of this loss of energy. Anna Guglielmi: Beuys, | wanted to ask you if you see in your artistic works a provocative connection, or simply a contemplative connection, with the animal world and the problems of agriculture. Is that only an ecological operation, or what is it? J.B.: Yes, It Is also an ecological operation. But there already one has to feel this idea of ecology with a spiritual understanding. Because in those of my actions where | work with an animal | sim-

ply try to show and to give imagination and inspiration so that the people can realise that the world consists of many more kingdoms

534

and ideas than just the human world. | could also have done the same thing with an angel: but an angel is an invisible power. But in trying to use un animal or a plant | tried to evolve, | tried to make clear, that other powers are also in existence: spiritual powers. This is the impulsion of the action with the spiritual idea of a wider understanding of anthropology. This is what | try to do. And | also try speak about intelligence in a much wider sense than merely to speak of this boring human intelligence. A rose has its intelligence; plants, agriculture, the earth, the waves and the winds they too have their own intelligence. And when the people work further on in this direction—like they work now politically and organizationally, with these kinds of system—this intelligence will feed back in a very gigantic way. So it is also a kind of prophesy of a possible catastrophe—coming out of this intelligence of nature—for this human intelligence will insist on working on in this stupid way, that is, restricting every view to an analytical, materialistic understanding of so called “natural science”: which in reality is not a science or the nature of life. PR.: Yes, but Joseph, do you not think that the question of our friend here might not be the proof of some ambiguousness in your work? What she said really is that what everybody can feel or see are objects as objects or animals as animals. But what you do is not that: what you do infact is to project your own view on those animals or on those objects. They are not then real objects, even I# they look real. They are the objects that you have selected, the objects which you have altered. lt is a piece of grease you have selected, or a piece of margarine. lt is your responsibility to have presented them in that way. No one, perhaps, can understand at the first approach that these objects are not objects because they are objects, but they are slightly altered things: because they give a certain feeling, they have a dimension of human responsibility, of human awareness, which envelops them. This kind of coverage of envelopment is vey important though it may not seem to be very apparent at times. If it were so apparent Anna would never have asked that question.

following pages Pierre Restany, 1990 Joseph Beuys, 1972

J.B.: Those kind of actions create, in a way, such kinds of provocation. But | find this kind of provocation is necessary for every process of dialogue. If you do not provoke very important questions then everything is in vain. So everybody who tries to work in a way which is very effective towards a possible future has to provoke, in the sense that he has to ask some very important questions. Maybe the person who asks these questions is not personally even able to answer them. But he can show the questions. He can say, “There and there and there seems to me to lie the problems of the world. Let us try to research, and let us be cooperators, all over the world; and let us struggle against every political order which tries to restrict this human need, all over the world, for dialogue.” All over the world dialogue is one of mankind's basic problems, you 535

know. And here | must also say there appears a kind of Christian idea: but not the idea of State and Churches—l have nothing to do with churches—but, nevertheless, the idea of Christianity is in the words “socialism/’ “brotherhood," “love” and all these things. And

here there is evident the idea of unity in mankind.

PR.: Do you take monotheism, in that sense, as the symbol of the unity of nature and the unity of life on the planet; do you take monotheism as, let us say, an idea of brotherhood, as that kind of idea? J.B.: No, the first step of the monotheistic principle comes out of the Old Testament, the idea of Yahweh. When this monotheos was only a kind of national god, then it was a kind of abstract principle. But with the appearance of Christ, this idea of unity as a new principle of brotherhood, love and social behaviour was fulfilled. This idea of unity is not a part of monotheistic thinking. Christ showed the possibility that one can overcome all “national” gods and all racist contradictions, and for the first time He established the principle of a kind of united spirit which exists, in reality, in everybody who lives in the world. This is the mystery. | see it in this way: that there was already a transformation, that it shifted away from the abstract idea of mMonotheism. PR.: Against polytheism, of course. In the Old Testament and in the history of the Israelitic people found in the Bible there is a constant refusal of polytheism, of course.

J.B.: Nevertheless, Moses was initiated into the Egyptian mysteries. And he made a special construction of this monotheistic idea so as to show a very ascetic restriction from this older understanding of culture towards a kind of preparation for the messianic system. So if the Messiah is the united spirit which will one day appear in the world, one has also to prepare the culture for the idea of this mMonos. PR.: In fact | hoped you would arrive at that idea. This kind of messianic idea of the monos did not become the second Christ, or something like that; | think that the messianic message of the monos developed later into two abstract truths of human awareness of the world, of human awareness of the unity of the world; first the alphabet and second the number. And | think that there is a precise link between monotheism, the alphabet and numbers. You know “zero” is God. And without the monotheistic sixth sense of “zero” we could never have invented the numerical arithmetic of today because the polytheistic civilization did not know, ignored “zero” and therefore ignored, of course, this kind of flexibility in numeration which we call arithmetic. J.B.: Yes, that is correct. But there now also appears this ambivalent structure of the thing. On the one hand mankind's develop538

ment of mind had to be confronted with the possibility of showing the materialistic condition. And one premise for making a clear analysis of the material condition is mathematics, is the structuring of the world through numbers and through alphabetical things. This gives the people a tool to analyse every material condition, and this concept started with the monotheistic impulse. On the other hand, when Christ appeared there was implanted another, wider principle against such abstract things. So only to maintain this first element of analytical methodology through time is the falsification of the mystery. With Christ there appears another kind of consideration: there is once again the possibility of different powers in the world— angels and also different gods, also this mystery of Mary and the question of women and all those things. Mainly a wider range of gods and goddesses appears with Christ. But nevertheless unity, in the sense of a new spirit and a new cultural impulse, is available for everybody all over the world. And | think that, in a way, Marx too felt this. And | think that principally the value of Marx‘ work is, to my mind and understanding, a very moralistic one. He felt that the time was ripe for all the world to follow one principle of brotherhood and love. This is for me the Christian element in the whole Marxist system. On the other hand there is an abstract element in Marxism and Marxist thinking which comes from the Jewish tradition: and this is for me a very important problem. PR.: Let us not forget that both Christ and Marx inserted this very, let us say, spontaneous, very deep, very human idea of universal brotherhood into rites, into ideology. Christ was a very strong Jewish devotee, but he created heretical rites for the Jews if you see what | mean. Because the rites of Christ were considered as heretical for the Jews of his day. J.B.: Certainly He was a revolutionary and that was the reason why He was crucified. And what He did with His so-called “miracles”—the resurrection of Lazarus, all those things—was to make the mysteries of the Pharisees “open,” open to the people, that is. So in a way he was a traitor to the mysteries of the high priests. So He made it open for everybody and said, “The Spirit is in everybody," and He did not reserve the mysteries as a priority for the high priests and the Pharisees. He was treated, in fact, as a traitor of the secret of the mysteries—and then he was crucified. PR.: But the historical result was a new Church just like the result of Marxism and of Marx's original thought was a new theory of power.

J.B.: Right; but this is also a misunderstanding of Christianity. There is a continuation of principles at work within the churches and in their understanding of organization. So we can see all these kinds of different views of Christianity which exist in different areas. For instance,

in the Eastern

Church

they work more

with other ele539

ments of Christianity, more with the element of St. John, whereas in other churches they develop the element of St. Paul and St. Peter and on this basis construct a more political organization. | find it so interesting because | feel all the time that Christianity develops— but perhaps it had more chance at the beginning, as an idea of a full understanding of sociology in relation to human beings. But then we have to find the wider manifestations with Freud and Marx and all those people, who were forerunners and very important, who plaved important parts in order to bring the people to such a point that they come nearer and nearer to a kind of catastrophic situation where they have to develop a wider understanding of diverse statements of life and spirit.

PR.: That is very strange: do you remember that | said before, in a very schematic way, that our Judeo-Christian civilization was based on this kind of schematic triangle? On Marx, Freud and this kind of monotheistic base? Perhaps we are now going even more towards a kind of monotheistic moral, and that more and more the evolution of our civilization is towards such a moral issue. Maybe, then, when we talk that way, more than social structure or social “pieces; more than a social theory, what in fact we have done is more in the direction of moral work; that perhaps your work is more moral, if we take morals as this kind of branch of philosophy of action. So there is a constant awareness in your work of the condition of the artist as a philosopher of his own actions. That is the real and strong moral approach. By the way, perhaps you can be considered as a kind of part-time Messiah. You act in many cases as a part-time Messiahn—you Joseph; you, Beuys. J.B.: / cannot always speak about what | do: you must, then, say how you see me from the outside.

PR.: Anyway | am very, very glad you gave that definition, that active, pragmatic definition of Christianity. Which is, perhaps, one of the most precious values which we have now. J.B.: For me Christianity has not got much to do with a new asceticism or a new so-called morality. It has to be the way to open the people's eyes, and to give the people wider views: not just to look at the blue sky, but to look through the blue sky and to look through everything. VVe have to live and experience that the world is very different to that idea of reality which the materialistic tendency would claim: that we are born and die, that there is nothing before and nothing after—all their complicated ideology and physicality. This restriction of the powers in the world is for me the reason for the dilemma in every so-called political system. This development is much older than the beginning of the industrial civilization in the last century; it is much older than the invention of capitalistic thought with Adam Smith and Riccardo. The roots are far, far older

and lie deeper. Nevertheless, | am not interested in softening the

540

existing power of the state in Germany with its Water Board and all those other practical things which we rely on every day. But | think that one cannot arrive at results, or at the right kind of very shatptools, if one works from the point where, for instance, social democracy dravws its ideology. VVe have to work with a much broader kind of sword on energy; for instance, what kinds of energy are available. The people are trying to get interested in this direction: there is so much energy existing in the world that the energy problem is not the whole problem. PR.: When you say that | am tempted to translate your words into a moral, philosophical or almost casual language. There was a time vhen Christian thought was influenced by Platonic thought, in fact in the neo-Platonists and in the person of St. Augustine. And the idea was to create on the earth the City of God. Do you think that we can now assume the possibility that, through a struggle against the mental pollution of our times, we could create this kind of Utopic City of God on earth? J.B.: That is the only possibility, which is not however, just the old possibility, which could appear as a kind of excuse for not finding a better way of doing things. No, | think that the only reality is the process of evolution. If one looks for the more intimate and mostly hidden processes in evolution then it is there that one will find real revolution: and that is also the idea of Christianity. So |am not once again going over the old system which wished to see the earth take on the consistency of God. God appears in everybody and in every natural object: this is already a kind of reality. It is just that our eyes have not been open until now for this reality. Therefore we are speaking about just which reality. And we are now, today, making a very important declaration about so-called reality, and this Is, therefore, a very important dialogue and interview. Because people mostly tend to speak only when they see, for example, that | am now involved in the political stream of theory. They try their best to see a kind of “normal” attitude or to be imbedded in the same culture. They do not question the totality, the possibility that everything must change. But everything must be changed so radically that nobody can imagine now or for the next twenty or thirty years, how great this change will be. If there is a possibility for mankind's future on a much higher level it will mean radically different needs for living, with radically different structures of thought and practice, and with a much wider understanding of the arts as the only way of life to produce things. Even in the industrial sense too. So we must no longer have such a bourgeois understanding of art theories.

PR.: Like there were two natures: the nature of the forest and the nature of industry, which of course is not true. May | ask you another question, Joseph? One which is, perhaps, a personal question? I have the feeling that this kind of global awareness of the necessity for a total change, based on a structural and moral motivation 541

of man, | think this idea came into your mind very suddenly: it was . rose up and, coming back into the not a kind of slow evolutionYou world, you started to think. J.B.: In principle that is true. But you see there is the very difficult problem of the impregnation of the majority of the people by radically contradictory ideas. These ideas come every day from the newspapers and every day from education: and they work in another direction. PR.: But you also work with these media. J.B.: Yes, sometimes. But in these cases | can only say three or four words; you cannot speak of the whole problem with such limitations. Sometimes the people get confused watching the television as they cannot follow the continuity of my ideas, or understand the reason why | say this or that. So sometimes what | have to say is distorted because | can only speak one small sentence for three or four seconds: | just end up saying “blah, blah” instead of getting near to explaining the realities. PR.: At the last Documenta it was evident that you had decided to use your limited speaking time in a Mondial vision programme in the attempt to make a social criticism of the cultural networks. Do you have the feeling that this speech was efficient? That it had a really strong impact on the audience? J.B.: Yes. It is evident that people continually return to this event at Kassel and they say that they now understand what | meant there, now that |am working within the ecological movement. And more and more people connect with this point in Kassel: they went through the space, they had some impressions and saw the global system of the flow of capital. And so | think this action was very efficient, a very effective one. PR.: In the prospect, let us say, of this global change, what could be the uses of the mass media for arriving at the maturation of the situation?

J.B.: / think the only real means for the mass-media would be that every enterprise of the media should itself administer the working collectives which work in such a means, and pay for it. But at the moment everything belongs principally to the State and to the political parties and their interests. It is in the interests of the massmedia to free these collectives from the influence of the State, and as a consequence this would also mean the freeing of the schools and universities from the State, because it is all an enterprise of the State which provides the money. As long as this ownership of the cultural institutions—to which the mass-media also belong—because it is a cultural duty to inform and educate the people; to give 542

information and to speak about what is going on in the world; and as | say, as long as this is an enterprise of the State we have also a kind of nationalization of economics. Because | see this as the most important part of the economy: the media, the mass-media, the schools, universities and all these cultural means of production, because they are building up a very real part of what is in reality the capital. And in reality the capital of a people or a population is their idealism. But these kinds of media are in control of the evolution of people's consciousness and develop their abilities in the negative direction. They educate people to be dependent, to become slaves of the consumer society and the capitalistic system. So this kind of medium tries to be biased towards capitalistic interests: this is not free education or the enlightenment of mankind's conscience. So | speak therefore simply of self-determination and of self-management and self-organization and all these enterprise. Because there is also a kind of spiritual economy: | no longer distinguish between industrial economy and spiritual economy. This is all the realm of economy. And the most important part of economy, especially that part of economy where the ability of the people should come up as a result of the process, has little chance so long as the capital of society lies in destruction. Then it is no wonder that, in that part of the economy where goods are of the utmost importance: that this has a bad quality, that it also brings a kind of physical pollution. The pollution starts in the spiritual part of the nationalized economy and it has its consequences in the economy of the so-called free market economy, which is basically not free. It is completely dependent on, and is completely controlled by, the interests of capital in the different capitalistic system. So | try to give this as a kind of idea to overcome it: | assume it is possible to come, step by step and as soon as possible, to a radically different structure of the social order which will have great consequences on money and on the economy and economic laws. For instance, the democratisation of the money problem is becoming for me a more and more important goal. There may not be another means to find an economic solidarity which works all over the world and supplies the needs for the third world too. There is no other possibility. PR.: Let us talk of a more strategical and practical view point. Capital is power, power is information. If you make no difference between capitalistic industrial power and capitalistic information power, then there is a part of this information control by capital which is spiritual because capital also controls the spiritual part of human production. Do you think that you can interfere in the spiritual part of information controlled by capital? Do you that by being an artist in the capitalistic world? J.B.: Yes, but | only use the institutions of the capitalistic system because there are other alternative ideas. The only possibility for the new element in the world is for it to grow within the old body. How could it go otherwise? You can only grow out of the old. So 543

there is no reason to avoid, for example,

the Guggenheim

muse-

um. | use every institute which is offered to me to show another radical idea of the future. But then there appears the new structure of society: this is organically organized and is based on mankind's freedom and self-determination and the necessity for the starting point to grow out of the idea of freedom for everybody. And then this spiritual power will no longer be a repressive power for the majority of the people. Because everything will be organized from this idea and every working collective, with the idea of self-organization and self-management, will have this very transparent structure. Also their problem will be delegated to a person who has more to do under the eyes of all the others who delegated that person, for example, to a top functionary. But they will be able to recall him if this thing is organised in a very transparent form: not central ized like in France with the problem of Paris, but de-centralized and working with associated elements all over the world, with the idea of association and not centralization of power in the state or politics or all those kind of things. So this idea of coming towards the possibility of getting everybody free, of getting everybody filled with energy, caring for their spiritual future, in is principle possible. But surely not from one day to the next. This will be a process of which | hope the first results will appear within five years. So when | say at the blackboard, “This is how we can overcome the capitalistic system in seven years," | oblige myself with this theory and hope in seven years we will see it. PR.: One of the leaders of the student protest movement in Berkeley, California, in 1967 and 1968, wrote about his experiences. And one of the ideas of his book is to consider revolution as theatre, and to undertake revolution as you do theatre.

J.B.: / say that it depends on the seriousness and on the character of the theatre if as a result of doing it in this way a kind of revolutionary process gets going or not. So this idea of theatre has two different aspects, a positive and a negative one. For example, | myself sometimes speak of the theatrical character of northern Ireland's political scene, you know: that there is there a permanent political theatre—in the media, for instance. They pull out all the stops, about the IRA and the everyday bomb. This will never lead to any kind of result ad this is the negative aspect of doing this thing as theatre. But if you speak about the tragedy of mankind, like the kind we spoke about, or the complicated structure of the revolution, then one has to look through to the so-called hidden realities or secret things which are still hidden. And then, when we are speaking about conservation in history where persons such as Plato, St. Augustine, Marx and Wittgenstein and the Happening appear, then we are speaking about another kind of theatre. This kind of theatre is more related to the principle mystery of mankind' life on earth; and not only on earth but also in other conditions before birth and after life. | think it is a different manifestation of theatre from simply theatre as a spectacle. 544

PR.: It appears to me also that this kind of ambiguousness is part of the history of the theatre. We can say, for instance, that it was true that Aeschylus's theatre was really linked to the mystery of life and the mystery of the human condition. The ancient Greek theatre became the model for, let us say, the modern and classical theatre. But | deeply suspect that the people who looked at Shakespeare— even though we, of course know that Shakespeare had a global vision of the world and that is the reason why we respect him—as | was saying, | suspect that the people of Shakespeare's time did not have the feeling that he was a global-vision man: | really do have this suspicion. And | suspect as much of the audience of Racine and Corneille and for all those kinds of great theatre people. It is perhaps only now, with the development of the Happening, you know, and the appearance on the art-scene of people linked to the visual art field who have invaded the human action field, that perhaps we are arriving once again at this kind of global action. In that sense the definition of Happenings as a global action was very, very important. J.B.: And during this time the majority of the people was already on the run, in the sense of a tendency towards materialistic culture. And therefore already during this time the theatre was taking on a kind of entertainment form, not like Schiller said, “Das Theater als moralische Anstalt.‘ Everything was taken as a kind of entertainment. PR.: And you are very right to say that, because | am sure that a lot of so-called “smart” people who do not understand your character have perhaps linked you to Schiller. |am sure of that; | do not know, but | think it is true. You know, there now comes to my mind something that Nam June Paik said to me: we were talking about people who are doing a kind of double activity in their creative work: building the personality, building the character and making the work in fact, you see. And we began to talk about you and he said to me, “You know | am not of the same opinion as you about Beuys. Well, you know | am an oriental, and for me Beuys is a big man because for an oriental all the Germans look the same; but not him!" This was two months ago. Sarenco: | want to say another thing. You are continually speaking about two situations: the capitalist power situation and the situation of State/socialist power, the capitalism of the State. | think that in this case you are in a half-way position. For me you are an empirical philosopher. There comes into mind a text by Lord Shaftsbury, the precursor of David Hume, when he said, “The most ingenuous way of becoming foolish is by a system. For me you are in this situation of the recuperation of philosophical empiricism, a great moraliser of Marxism and the false empiricism of the new-capitalist situation. | think that you are in this situation of recuperating a high and good empiricism such as the situation of the totality of man. | 545

think your position against all the systems, the socialist system and the capitalistic system, is to be seen in the light of those words of Lord Shaftsbury: what do you think? J.B.: Yes, that is right and | agree completely. It is for that reason that | do not work with systems. | speak about the structure of the future; | will never apply the idea of “system” to such a future structure. | can only speak of a kind of organic way of finding a solution for co-operation for all the people all over the world in associative, de-centralized forms. | must use some forms of language so | already am, surely, in some kind of language situation or system. But | am always awake to such a danger—which exists always, every day, in every hour—of bringing a thing in the direction of a dead language which works in an abstract way against human interests. This shows the dynamic necessity of using an idea of permanency that at every moment is clearly mankind's consciousness: its effect will be that the people in the future will have to solve many more interesting problems in their lives than now. So they must always be awake and not sleepy, not becalmed by a system. So this charges the people of the future, surely, with more attention towards all the dangers which try to lead everything into that system. There, for me, lies the importance of ecology, because for me ecology does not only mean the biosphere and the populace of the planets, the pollution of air and water; it means first of all the pollution of the soul and of the mind. And then also the pollution of the social body, generally. And yes, then you can, step by step, develop an attitude towards the social organism, like your attitude to a living being and in this way you can always maintain the social body in a living condition. This is the big artwork which future mankind must solve, you know: to maintain the social organism as a permanent artwork which has to be in balance with mankind's energy and boundless imagination, inspiration and intuition—and it must be like this every day and in every moment, otherwise we will fall down into dead systems: and then the power structure will work against mankind's interests. | hope that is clear. PR.: May | add something? You made a crucial point, which is a kind of structural point: but Epictetus was also a moral empiricist and his moral empiricism was quite strong. Remember that the menner of saying of something of Epictetus was quite strong. He said something which was very important—l remember this sentence well because | had to talk about him when | matriculated. He said, ‘Be kind to yourself and for yourself and, in some way or other, you will effect the others”

Anna Guglielmi: So, if | have understood, your wise ideas of ecological and anthropological art form a philosophical point of view which goes beyond the idea of the avant guarde, which is usually thought of as “work in progress” Perhaps, then, it would be better to quote the words of an Italian contemporary artist, Claudio Costa, 546

who has referred to “work in regress”: | mean by that, a conscious and historical recuperation of all the potentiality of man. J.B.: But that is not my idea. If | search for older conditions of mankind in the ideas of St. Augustine and Plato it is certainly not because | want to go back to this state of man. For me “work in progress" is the character of working towards the future. Because when we look back at the utterances of different persons such as Shakespeare, Epictetus and Empedocles and all those persons, one can only find the kind of character of each and how the evolution of the consciousness progresses. And this is the reason for looking again towards evolution. For instance, to see the parallels in the utterances of Plato which fit clearly and perfectly into the message of Christ: this is important. Just as it is to see that this was the time when there began that movement towards a kind of time when the people have to take it by themselves and develop all those things like “God.” This is the principle of putting God back into the world. The first process was to throw all the dignities out of the world and bring things down to a sheerly materialistic state. And now another process starts: not back to the state of Plato, but towards a future, as an evolution of another consciousness, where the idea of self-determination and freedom is the new element. During the times of Plato freedom did exist. Christ spoke about freedom, but freedom was not brought by Christianity, through the churches: that was another power structure. And so we can speak today about the power of Churches and of States. But now, slowly, the idea of freedom is beginning to appear within (mankind's own abilities, one could almost say) democratic conditions. This idea of freedom is beginning to appear; but now some difficulties also appear, where the Marxist reading of socialism is yet another declaration of faith. Now people must get things clear in their own minds, and they have to think within their own powers, all things which are the outcome of their own freedom: and this is a really new and radical aspect of the world. Nothing is done any more by inspiration, by what we call in German

“Offenbarung," or

where are high priests or leaders or charismatic leaders: certainly they still exist, as in Iran, where, as a result of Islamic tradition,

there is again a leader. But that is a false principle. That is not the principle of freedom.

PR.: But all the same it is true that Ayatollah Komeini will disappear one day, and, yes, he will have been a fanatic and everything. But he did something which was positive: he brought all the pragmatic values of Islam back into the present day. We have the feeling, you know, that the Islamic civilization was dusty and was anacronistic, that they could never cope with present issues. Yet now he has made Islam once again a current reality. J.B.: And that is the worst ofit... 547

PR.: That is exactly it. And that is the big danger. The big danger IS not present fanaticism, because that will disappear one day. It is the illusion that Islam is still present which is dangerous. J.B.: One part of this argument | can understand and appreciate; but the other side of the question is that again the idea of Islam, in the way it is traditionally thought of, principally appears in the same way as Christianity appears in the person of this Pope.

PR.: Exactly. You are quite right. J.B.: And now the people must think about cultural developments: what is the meaning of Islam? How was it that the arabian world was the inventor of medicine, mathematics, astrology, astronomy and all those other fantastic impulses of that area? What is the link between the antique world of Greek sculpture and Alexander the Great? What is the principle leading impulse in this area of the world, the Islamic world? And how is this big theatre for the world's fanatics to come to new kinds of freedom? That is for me also a very interesting aspect. | basically see no difference between the Pope and Ayatollah Komeini. PR.: And that is also a good example of how the mind of Beuys works. The idea of this kind of regressive recuperation of the values of the past is for him totally inexistent. In his own mind it does not exist. He does not work that way. All of these values are in the same kind of time, in the sense that history is a kind of globality for him. And when he argues and makes a reference to Pilato it is just because Plato could be used, imprisoned in actual terms: if not he will quite simply forget Plato. So | think you made quite a good point of seeing the difference. It would be a big mistake to consider Beuys's pope as a kind of speculation or a kind of recuperative operation. Sarenco: Perhaps there is another aspect. The concept of “work in regress" is not the recuperation of the past, it is only the recuperation of the totality of man. The concept of “work in progress” is only a technological and futuristic concept. PR.: Do present. of man. because

not forget that the situation of man in his actuality is always This is a fundamental problem if you want to test the level The sense of his globality is this: man is always present man is always in front of the possibility of evolution.

J.B.: / could understand these aspects if they are manifested in a more intelligent way. To see it as kind of globalisation set against this positivistic belief in permanent economical growth or technological evolution can work alright. But then you must come to a deeper foundation of the problem and that is for me the most important thing. You can no longer do the thing in this primitive and 548

easy way if you find the progressive production no longer functions. Nevertheless you must find the kind of progressive character in evolution. You must not struggle against the idea of progression: that would be a falsification of mankind's fate or mankind's mission or mankind's history. You can never regress to other states of man: it would eliminate and would even devalue all the suffering of all the millions and millions of people who died under this kind of materialistic repression. It is only by reaching that small spot where the man of the people is so pressed with necessity of breaking through the borders that one can really reach the kind of progressive future. To go back to Plato would be a very easy way to placate matters, but it would not help the problem.

PR.: Man is rich because he is also in possession of all his sufferings and all his experiences. So here already is explained why you must not go back to recuperate, as part of man's globality, this kind of experience: because if it were not there, the problem would not exist. | think with that we can conclude. With the hope that we will see the Green Movement come to power within seven years in Germany: this is something we say today, Friday 7 June 1980 and we place our hopes in Joseph Beuys. We also hope that te will change his grey hatfor a green one to symbolize that change. J.B.: Thank you Pierre Restany, meeting.

thank you all for this wonderful

(interview by Pierre Restany, with the collaboration of Anna Guglielmi, Sarenco, Diego Strazzer, on the occasion of Joseph Beuys's exhibition at the R. Salomon Guggenheim Museum in New York, October 1979. Pierre Restany gave this to me in Milan, on the occasion of the book Pierre Restany. L'Eco del Futuro, Silvana Editoriale, Milan 2005)

549

ELEVENTH READING Harald Szeemann

Anschwebende Plastische Ladung vor to become public and go out into the open and ind show them what we have done, and we have iousness of the problem of freedom. Freedom i

edom

of the other, it's not at all a question of

dom, it's a question of the freedom of my brothers and s or of my sisters and my brothers. So when | come out of laboratory, or my workshop, or whatever | want to call the place ere | am trying to produce something or to get something done or effect a collaboration with other people as a whole community of rkers, | can't simply declare that you have to believe in what | have done, or that what | have done is a quality product simply because it happens to be my product; | can't even declare that it has any particular qualities at all. All | can do is to take advantage of the possibility or to accept the duty of showing people what | have done, and then | have to ask them whether or not it's useful. And if we were to begin to make use of or to practice this kind of technique, we'd very soon find ourselves capable of being truly productive, and in fact much more productive, hundreds and thousands of times more productive than anything we find now in the organized labor of capitalistic enterprise or in the stateorganized labor of centralized communistic enterprise. When we have the awareness of cooperating together as free individuals, we are also much closer to the creation of a real and concrete democracy, because democratic structures have to be a result of free thought and of our equality as thinking individuals, which is the basis on which we can then construct a constitution. We can be much more productive than we are, and we can also move off to acquiring a much clearer consciousness of ourselves, which is the same as saying that we can come to full consciousness of what creativity really means. Creativity, moreover, can't be thought of as 831

something single and monolithic; it's. something that's. highly diversified and that has to be studied from a variety of points of view and in terms of several realities. We begin to come a great deal closer to a well-diversified understanding of the human being as consisting of a number of extremely different elements of creativity, and we begin actually to approach these various strata of creativity. Creati is a question of the possibility of thinking, or, we might say of thinkir power, and it's also a question of the level of the creativity of th feelings. When we talk about the powers of thought, we immedi i make reference to our heads and to the brain, and when we talk« feeling, we're referring to the region of the heart and the parts of the body around it, and in this way we've already begun to talk about two

parts of a complex organism. But it's also logical to continue and to talk about the driving power or general energies th È these levels that l’ve already mentioned, and here we're closer to talking about the whole machinery of energy that consists of the . creativity of the will, or of will power. What | am saying in terms of the — way in which human beings are organized and function as organisms, leads us to acknowledge that there are three different levels of Re

adopt this practice, we immediately feel like taking the first = and elaborating and considering phenomena in the context ofan attempt see that a tree is crucially connected with nese reflections as it too

consists of different levels or strata of creativity. As we talk of tripartite human crea.tivity, consisting of the power to think, feel and want, we can observe the existence of similar strata in a tree with its leaves as a crown, its trunk, and its roots. And at this point we are close toa ——— clear understanding of the way in which these activities (all of which {{_{— derive from a wide concept of art which subseguently extends to. —

working in society and in nature) cannot be measured with the same yardstick applied to forms of action which are only symbolic: they are. grappling instead with truths which are part of the very meaningof — reality, and they enable us to see the way in which the cultureof the past affects not only us, but also nature itself. Cultures of the past drew closer, closer, and closer to a sort of critical point, a crisis point, at which the final part of their methodology for the clevelopment of the nature of the human species (in the aspect of our ability for concentrated thought) could only end in that collapse which leads into the straits of an entirely materialistic understanding of the world, in which there is no longer any appreciation of the whole reality of what exists, as the central truth for every reality. It allows for only a single and highly specialized methodology for the utilization of the dead and physical aspect of the world, of the physical and mathematical aspect of the world, and its only object is the exploitation of the world and the possibility of digging out everything which can be extracted from It, and all to the exclusive benefit of what we might term a sort of selfish profit. We might also realize that what leads to what we can be termed the final crisis—the simultaneous destruction of the human species and of nature, another result of this materialist visione of the 832

world—is a social order which reflects this type of structuring which is no longer able to solve the problems existing within it. It follows therefore, and quite logically, that our task is to discover a new form of social order which would be able to put into effect a different use human faculties, of human work and productive power, and which a go beyond the way in which these forces are organized and

utilized both in private capitalism and in centralized and statentrolled communism. And it is because of this that, together with ho are working with me in this attempt to reach an alternative her level of the ordering of society, we have seen it necessary n with the elaboration and implementation of a series of real . Bruno Corà has already mentioned Aktion Dritter Weg, and ole idea of this third way is to say no to the first possibility of private capitalistic use of humankind's creativity, and then no to second historical step of working through centralized, staterolled economic planning; this third way is concerned with models e order of what we're currently trying to realize by planting seven oak trees in a particular place in Germany. We can take that le. example, and what it means is that we don't have to be h formulating some kind of theory of the future since the third way means: the “third way” means the ‘uture”" means the “third way” Our theories are imply be content to talk about or to express in with getting things done in ways that are real at itself is our way of giving greater diffusion to the ti and behind them. | can also say that this is why lm now in Bolognano. | first made contact with a few people from region some twelve years ago—primarily with Lucrezia De Domizio id Buby Durini—and the fact that they were already quite close to e kinds of thoughts, ideas, and ways of putting things into practice has led them into ever wider collaboration with the organization l’ve founded under the name of the Free International University. And now we're already at the point of actually entering the reality of doing the same thing in Bolognano that we have already done in Kassel with the seven thousand oaks. The plan that has brought me here to Bolognano and that bears the title Difense of Nature is more thanjust a slogan: it's a concrete plan for the planting of seven thousand different varieties of trees in Bolognano. In Kassel l’ve been dealing mostly with oaks, but here in Bolognano we'll be developing a kind of “paradise” where we'll have seven thousand trees of seven thousand different spedes. It's in the course of actually doing this work that everything else will become clearer. It's in the course of actually doing that we'll see the theory within and all of its implications—its implications in terms of epistemological ideas, in terms of anthropological ideas, in terms of our relationship to the biosphere, in terms of society and ecology, in terms of finding ways for the creation of what | call social credit or social financing for the realization of such a project. Its implications at all of these levels will follow and express themselves organically. Here, in Bolognano, the realization of the project will require a little more time than what's been planned on for the planting of the seven thousand 833

oaks in Kassel, and everything will depend upon the energy and enthusiasm of the people actually involved here in this region of the

world, but l’m sure it will all be done within twelve years, and that the @

trees will be big and thick by the time | die. The youngest people now

sitting here in this room will then be the people entrusted with taking time, which is something very important in choosing to wor trees, and especially in choosing, as l’ve done in Germany, to work oaks, which are beings that live for a very long time. Such a 2

We have to ask ourselves what role our individual creative.

play, and does play, in the moving and dee how it connects with me, with my being, power. My consciousness, my ego, my sou

oftil time. fervicuzi creative

jill--how does all of|

the tree again when the tree has grown and reacl through the element of time that the human indi

his duties

and

his responsibilities.

And,

confrontation on the level of the meditation

of a series of highly diversified strata of well- diffe ntia nd: power such as the power of thought, or the. ‘power ‘of thinki ( analysis, and then the feeling power of the soul, and.ithe powe will as it comes to expression through our extremitie move and work and do things with our hands. When pe become involved in working with this element of time, physicality of doing certain kinds of things with their hands in aworking. place that's involved with time, they immediately begin to detect that what we call creativity is connected with faculties that are even higher than thinking, feeling, and willing. They immediately have a kind of vision that's a way of rec;eiving the information that comes from these activities and they can see that there are higher forms of thinking that we can call imagination. They find themselves confronting a new reality that's both an invisible and yet a visible reality since, even in its invisibility Itcan come into visibility in the reflection of the mirror of consciousness,

and this reality is the reality of the existence of imagination, inspiration, and intuition. And it's here that we meet each other in a field where we no longer have any need for any of the traditional kinds of religion, because it's here that we find ourselves in the field of the spirit itself And this for me is the meaning ofplanting trees. It's not only a quetion of working with biology and of taking care of things that are alive, and it's not at all a question simply of putting oneself at the service ofilife. 834

—

It's a question of our saving our souls. That, finally, is the goal we're involved with in planting trees. At this point ld like to leave off talking and to ask you all to bring up hatever questions you have, and we can try to get into some kind of eal discussion. And that really ought to be easy because this idea of ting trees and of anthropological and social art makes for a whole ce of its own, and | find it extremely interesting that as soon as we touch upon this field, it immediately becomes impossible to find f frustrated or with the feeling that you're being asked to deal ings that are external to you. There must surely be millions of t questions. Hundreds and hundreds of thousands of different ns and hundreds and hundreds of thousands of different s, and this is the point where we have to sort things out rically. We have to move towards some kind of decision and try to ut priorities. And we have to discover that we can be something ‘than pluralized, and split up into parts and factions. We have to ind ways of sticking together and co-operating. We have to go beyond /ay the world itself is all split and divided. We live with everything I against itself. Politicians sometimes call this the pluralized pluralization is something that we have to overcome. We're ut , and self-determination, and productivity for the as for the individual. pe a reason for a great many questions. s has presented a beautiful talk that seems to the idea of the creative possibilities and the freedom idual and ofhumanity at large, and l'd like to go into this a le more deeply and to understand it a little better by asking him for an planation of something said earlier this morning in a discussion with oup of people that included Lucrezia De Domizio and Arcangelo . lzzo. He was talking about what's now called the manifestation of the " post-modern in the visual arts, and he described this kind of work as a cancer that's already gone into metastasis. l'd like to know what he meant by that. Joseph Beuys: This morning, really, we were talking about tradition, and about authoritarian social systems and we were also talking about some of the ways in which changes have taken place in the course of time. We were talking about a particular moment of crisis in human devolopment and seeing that there was a particular moment of time in which it took place. Humanity was involved in a kind of development that led it ever closer to a narrow little passage where everything was zeroed out. And | think of everything that lies before this point in time and human development as belonging to the past. This was the point of crisis that introduced us to the necessity for the existence of anthropological art, and everything that lies before that point in time belongs, for me, to the sphere of traditional art. And from this point of view, even what we call modern art belongs to the sphere of traditional art. This isn't of course to say that the outstanding personalities of modern art didn't offer us a very great 835

number of visions of the future, and Picasso would be an example of that, and we also have the concepts that were revealed by the surrealists, there were the constructivists as well, and people like Mondrian, all off whom had extremely important visions concerned with the nature of the future, and you'd also want to include Marc È Duchamp. All of them too were asking for a transformation of soi

and you could say, from this point of view, that all of these pec l've mentioned were anarchists. But they were involved i development of methodologies and ways of thinking and ;

no way then of avoiding the conclusion t post-modern boils down to a nonorganic m

and an illness. lt comes to be something en act with any of organic growth, which is to say that it loses viable concept of the future. In terms of the ent of human _— cognition and consciousness, this whole idea of t al: stmodern is absolutely nothing at all. It simply doesn't exist. There's no kind of organic justification for it. This, at least, is the formula or the theory through which | see these phenomena, and | think the theory is correct in the sense that it's demonstrable and can. furnish a series of

proofs of itself. but, at one and the same time | don't think of it as Judgment of any particular individuals who've happened to base their. work on this particular misunderstanding. With time, it's perfectly | possible that what they're doing will bring them to the conclusio that the whole idea of the post-modern is much the same thing as all of the constantly repeated attempts to prolong the system of the — capitalistic exploitation of human and natural resources. It's simply a comfortable way of trying to avoid the real problems that we're faced with, and it deals with these problems in ways that are entirely private, it attempts to make an egotistical exploitation of the problems rather than to solve them, and it doesn't give any real insights. Corrado Levi: “l'd like to ask Beuys, who's a very great artist, to give us acomment on a series of observations that l'd now like to try to outline. First of all, | ask myself if he doesn't feel that the action of planting trees is itself an alteration of nature. Secondly, it seems to me that the solutions he offers us for effecting a change in our current capitalistic, centralized, and authoritarian situation are based on factors of individual energy and enthusiasm, and | wonder if these aren't the very same methods that have guided traditional politics and led to all the ills we now see the need of curing. And this is the third question: this vision of 836

a disruption in the organic growth of things is a part of an extraordinary German tradition, and l'd like to know what sort of possibility you see for the reintegration of these fractures. At the level of cognition, they've been extemely important for us, and | want to know how you see them fitting into some possible new system” seph Beuys: This of course is a very complicated question since re bringing up the whole problem of philosophy, but l'Il try to deal h your comments one point at a time. First of all you asked if my { with trees doesn't in itself constitute an alteration of nature. And, course, it's an alteration of nature, but the need for it stems from Iterations of nature that have resulted from what we can think haps, as a negative expression of human creativity. Changes in have already been brought about by people and their economic , which is something we always have to refer back to. There's no Even to talk about culture as long as everyone remains dependent ) the economies and the styles of production that exist on the one )under the capitalistic system, and on the other hand under the ist system. All we really need to talk about are economic d systems of production. These economic systems of the ged nature so very radiclly as already to endanger its ence. If you read the MIT report, you'll see that there who believe that by the end of this century we N y ability to save the power of nature, and that y that the quality of life is destined even more changes in nature have already resulted from the creativity, and this positivistic and materialistic form oitative creativity has already run its course. What we have to do n is to take the next step and to bring about a change of direction. e kind of alteration has already taken place, and the new alterations t have to be undertaken are intimately connected with what we can the decay of nature and the decay of nature's evolutionary power. lt seems to me too that we also have to understand that the life and the evolutionary power of this planet are already very old. This planet, this earth that sometimes convulses with earthquakes, is already quite old in spite of that. So from the organic and ecological points of view, we have to come to nature assistance in a therapeutic kind of way. And this therapeutic way of working in nature means that every form of nature that can exist after the crisis of total and totally negative materialism must necessarily be a question of a world produced by human beings. Nature in the past was a mirror of the creativity of the powers of evolution, and various cultures have left us with images that talk about God and the Creator and the principles of the creativity of nature, and they also tell us that the existence of human beings was litewise the expression of the work of a principle of creativity. Today I don't want to get involved with a discussion of the various points of view that find expression in various religious systems, but we can see in any case that all of these things are coming to their end. God is dead. And from an anthropological point of view that's an extremely important thing to say, since the moment in which God dies is the moment in which human beings attain freedom. lt means that God is 837

now to be found within the human being. And since God now resides within us, we have no choice now but to be the creators of the future. Every possible future will be the result of the work ofhuman beings, and this is why we have to talk about freeing ourselves from ancien

principles of authority. We even have to liberate ourselves from G Then we become the creators and it follows quite logically that 1 in the future will go through extremely radical forms of change the answer that /d ga to your question, and its clear sui Le

discover the existence of these moments in history vico 2)

comes to a turning point. Everyone has to see for ri

t

La Penna: “First of all, l'd like to offer my compliments to Beuys for this initiative that he has undertaken in defense of nature, b' ut as far

Joseph Beuys: First of all, you've said that these are utopian ideas, and that means that we have to talk about what one means by a “utopian” idea. “Utopian," after all, is a term that's used in several very dior” ways, and we should talk at least about two gdthe dovsi în which îts irrational vision v of the world that may aisi A someE otel qu or some other dimension relating to art, but that finally remains without

any possible application to the realities of life. People who make this kind of use of the word utopian are insisting, really, that one ought

to look for some other kind of message that would be able to effect a real change in society. They're talking about the idea of “utopia” as. something entirely negative. But there are also other people who have a different way of making use of this word, and they sometimes speak of “concrete utopia” to make it clear that what they're interested in is a longterm project for a possible reality, or a real futurological plan for the real liberation of humanity. It's a question of indicating the direction in which we have to move. That, for example, is what Rudi Dutschke is talking about when he speaks of taking a “concrete utopian view” of things. This kind of utopian thinking is futurological thinking, and the necessity for futurological thinking lies in the necessity of anticipating the future so that we can find some sort of orientation as we move forward into it. The aim here is to discover a series, say, of self-grounding axiomatic rules, just as mathematical proofs are self-grounding in the sense that they contain the principles that are needed for their demonstration: they're self-grounding because they/re grounded in the principles that control human reasoning. And this is 838

precisely the kind of thing l'm involved with: l'm trying to discover the rules that determine the quality, character, and direction of actions that have to be undertaken. The future, surely is something that we have o anticipate; and we have to be able to describe its relationship with of the inner powers that reside within the body of society. We have e able to describe the way the future order of society, can find its 9asis and point of departure in humanity's creativity within the realm pirit, and in the freedom of the spirit of the free and individual being, and we have to be able to see the way in which selfination has to be organized. ve to be able to talk about modalities for the organization of ices for the production of our most important goods, which is tion of the improvement of humankind abilities in schools, ities, and other institutions as well as in the fields of agriculture Ilthe other scientific activities. lave to be able to see how all of that has to be organized—and

ere already dealing here with the problem of human freedom. When alk about freedom, we're dealing with the way every individual Jo unique personality. In the area of the spirit, and as well, ‘eulture, every single individual who lives on the face of e and has his own unique forms of creativity, his needs. Every individual is himself a whole world. ig about creativity, and therefore about freedom, way in which everybody is different, and the al problem is to find a way of connecting this f the nature of the human individual to the equally cessity of living in a society thats based on a principle of ality before the law. Even though every individual is a unique and erent world, there has to be some sort of a regulator in a modern I democratic society that gives us the possibility of being free from cial and economic authorities. All of these differing individual personalities have to be equal before the law. Here again we can see the way the concept of democracy is ordinarily corrupted. When democracy is understood as an ideology and as a theory for the attainment of political power, it's taken simply to imply that everybody is equal. But the idea of freedom tells us that everybody is different, and the idea of democracy should simply mean that everybody is equal before the law. What we're really dealing with is a question of two extremely different strata of power within the social body. On the one hand we have the necessity that people have inner creative freedom, and on the other hand the necessity of equality before the law and thus of a regulator for every freedom, since freedom comes to an end when it compromises the freedom of another individual. Therefore we need both of these powers, and we have to see that they exist within two different strata of the creativity of the social body. This means, in turn,that we slowly begin to learn that the social body has to be thought of as an organism; and the final and by no means least important result of the proper articulation of freedom, on the one hand, and law, on the other—or of freedom and democracy—is an even further and more radical developement 839

of our anthropological powers. It's unthinkable for these powers to be limited by the course of the historical development of any particular state. They can't be allowed to be hindered, for example, by a state based upon the existence of political parties. The entirety of our understanding of the meaning of an enlarged concept of anthropological art is based upon the conviction that human crea will find ways of articulating a constitution and a catalogue of that will express new regulatory principles for the use of mon

the field of economics.

Freedom in the field of creativity, an

ability and intelligence that all of us possess will find ways in future to express an idea for a truly democratic constitution, and democratic constitution of the future will surely supersede some the parliamentary and partypolitical characteristics of the present state of private capitalism to make it entirely clear that we ourselves are the state. Creativity will then appear as the most sovereign power of all. The idea of creativity assumes wider and wider implications and finally reveals that the only sovereign in the state is the free human individual. The idea of creativity is finally nothing other than the declaration that each one of us, every single person, and'all of us together, is a representative of the social order and 9 state.

Each one of us is the sovereign, and since each of us is an individual with an enormity of creative power, we'll be capable of formulating a constitution that gives expression to new financial and economic laws. New and different and democratic laws produced by the people, by the sovereign people, will create a radically different economic system based on a different use of money, and all'of this will take place within the very near future. We're talking about a complete and concrete advance beyond the way money is now used in current

capitalistic and communistic societies. Even thoughit now primarily exists as something we can anticipate through intuition and analysis, or something of which we can only see certain anticipatory signs, we can look forward to the establishment of a social reality that's equipped with a new and different system of credit and financing. The idea of capital will undergo a radical change and be understood from an anthropological point of view. People will no longer think, for instance, of capital as consisting of money, or of various means of production, and they‘Il understand that humanity's only real form of capital is nothing other than the ability and the creativity of people themselves. A truly anthropological understanding of capital tells us that capital and the human spirit are one and the same thing. And the use of our abilities in the different working places that exist in society requires social credit, which means credit from a truly democratic banking system that operates on a parallel to the elementary process of creativity and the products that come out of it. From this point of view, the only economic value that can possibly be recognized is human creativity and its products. T he primary economic value is creativity, which means the spirit and the ability of individual human beings, and their dignity as well: and what results from this dignity is the quality of what the people who possess it produce. In such a system, there's no such thing as the 840

possibility of profit, there's no such thing as the possibility of abusing and denying the dignity of the individual in the place in which he works as a way of creating profit for a minority. And there are no other possibilities for a future ordering of society. With every year that isses, humanity finds itself in an ever more critical confrontation ‘h an ever deeper need to gain insight into solving the problem of faging the quality of nature and of life itself. This is a time in which an enormity of things that have to be done and in which things ntic dimensions have to be changed: the forests in central are dying, and pollution has already poisoned every stream

river, and every other source of drinking water; areas around trial concentrations no longer have any clean and breathable air; humanity is involved in the problem of the poverty of the nations third world where millions of people are dying day in and day year by year. This world in which there are so many things that to be done is the very same world in which the countries that ed on the ideologies of communism and private capitalism are gd with unemployment and begin to talk about the shortening r week. | myself see things quite differently. How do things stops for a moment to consider the kinds of problems ere in Italy, for example: the problems connected the lives that are lived by the Italian people, and eted with the quality of nature in Italy? Here in hat nature is still a paradise, but that's not the s ofltaly, or if you think about the pollution of ranean, which is a sea now dwindling into total death. for a gigantic problem, and the number of people who Wv live in Italy simply isn't sufficient for doing all the work that has be done. But the political system hasn't developed a system of it and financing that would allow people even to begin. There's no sibility of finding employment to do the most important work of all. And this is why | start with models, as for example with the work we're now beninning here in Bolognano and in other places in the world; we're involved with illustrating the possibilities of an entirely new system of credit. VVe're concerned with things that can be done in our very own time, with things that can be done right now. That also means that we have to be involved in speaking with people who bear responsibility in the state, in the political parties, and in industry, since we have to bring them to the insight that there is no other way out. The only possibility worth talking about lies in creating a new credit system, in effecting a change in both communism and capitalism, arid in bringing things together on a higher level of social order. This is the only way of working towards world peace. Our final goal is to bring the world into a situation of fullscale global cooperation; and the East and the West have to establish a kind of permanent conference on the real possibilities of reaching such a higher level of cooperation. This is the whole idea of the founding of the Free International University; it's also, to some extent, a part of the project of the Green Party in Germany; it's likewise the essence of the idea of planting seven thoudand oaks in Kassel and of planting seven thousand different 841

species of trees here in Bolognano. Our purpose is to make a reality of a phrase that was famous in the last century here in Italy, and even at the beginning of this century, when teachers told every child in the P country that “Italy is a garden." Si Raballi: “| work with the ecological magazine La Malalingua, in

developed, an a kind of parallel with the Grùnen movementin Ge

And most of all, | wanted to know if you see them as falling in with the kind of art that you've been explaining, which to say v it kind of art that you're involved in practicing.”

which these lines of communication broke dovr In any case, | ri the feeling that things here in ui were being dealt vil in terms

6

in opposition to their actions and ideas It hae 1 that |can't see any difference between what they wanttodo and what the Social Democratic party wants to do. Before the moment in which they became a party, which is to talk about that time at. which the green movement was still only a movement, | found them much

closely connected to the line of the Free International University that l've been trying to describe to you today. The Green political party is already something that we have to try to improve, and | think that's still a possibility. | don't see things pessimistically, but at the same time, don't have any reason to be particularly optimistic. Possibilities, in ‘any case, still remain open, and this is a road we can attempt to travel by attempting to make a contribution offresher and more important ideas. | expect that there a fairly similar situation with the Italian ecological movement. But the fact remains that people should give their support to these new endeavors, even though new endeavors can easily make mistakes. People ought to give their support to a new ecological movement, or to a new ecological political party, but they should also try to correct the course that's being followed. And there's of course a contradiction between what | was saying before and what lm saying now. On the one hand | try to recommenda particular political partvr—the ecological political partyr—and on the other hand | see that there are no real possibilities in working with political parties. Things don't get done when you work through political parties. And here we are again with the difficulty of getting people to realize the necessity of the creation of other kinds of systems. Within a short period of time, | think that 842

people will have lost all interest in voting for political parties. It's very often possible to think that the most conservative party of them all is the Communist Party, which ought to be a contradiction. What | am trying to do is to reveal a view of a future in which we will some day > Sure to see the employment of other principles for the organization

Ferro: “My name is Toni Ferro, and | call myself not an artist but oetic explorer! | came here thinking l'd pay homage to ecological to the person principally responsible for its invention, Beuys. But instead of that, l've had the surprise of hearing ge to anthropological art, which is something | myself have d. Naturally, | don't speak of inventing it in the sense of having ed it out of nothing, but rather in the sense of having defined i of having founded a magazine called Rivista di ricerca d'arte È pologica. It's a magazine that's published in two languages, and 's published in the city | think of as the world capital of anthropology, les. In 1979, a group of Neapolitan artists who weren't invited Centre Pompidou, in Paris, formed the Anthropological Art Interesting to give a brief analysis of these two forms | art and anthropological art. Anthropological art, «igrows out of the context of libertarian socialist y from anarchical thought. | was born in 1968, fenice Biennale, | made the declaration, ‘Art is ce 1972, up until the present, | have never sold È

have a gallery, and there aren't any historians who my history. That's entirely inconceviable. To allow myself e a poetic explorer, | make a living by doing another kind of work, ch is teaching art in a public school (it's only natural, of course, for to do something that's close to the things that interest me). But take a step backwards and have a look at these two forms of art. In 1968, along with friends like Julian Beck, who ought, | think, to be remembered in a context such as this, we saw the formation, here in Italy, of a strategy of art of dissent. Art and the artist no longer existed in terms of aesthetics, but rather in terms of politics: we made use of art as an instrument of political action. And while a group ofltalian artistis—| was working with the group called ‘teatro comunitario, for example—was doing guerrilla street theater (this was in 1968 and 1969) Julian Beck, whom | very much esteem, was doing Paradise Now in a theatre and asking his public to go out into the streets. But we were already in the streets and were able to welcome Julian Beck when he came out to join us. | think | have the honor here of representing tens, and hundreds, and thousands of artists who have done much the same thing | have done, and who have turned their art into a truly political instrument, a poetic instrument, where aesthetics has transformed itself into ethics, and thus into a way of living and being. It's for precisely this reason that these artists aren't found in the pages of history, or not, in any case, in this kind of history. They haven't been recorded, or registered, or defined, or given a place by history. What | want to say now is that the ideas Beuys has given 843

us have my complete approbation, and | see the necessity of the message he has come here to bring us. lt has to be thought of primarily as a poetic, rather than a political message, even though it's impossible really to understand it without having lived the experience of the whole of a certain context of political struggle. There a few things, of course, that divide us, just as there were thing divided my positions from those of Julian Beck, whom | saw ag too long ago in New York. It's a disagreement not about model and life, but rather about strategy. The strategy of our anthropol group isn't a question of a clear and direct attack on capitalism

communism,

which

is the authoritarian

form

of socialism;

i

strategy of psychological disturbance of the structures of cultu SS categories that are typical of the capitalist and communist systems. \Ve don't say that art is dead, because we're convince sd that art is life:

and this is the sense in which all men are artist There has to be a change in art and in the ways in which art is made. And this means that we have to have poetic awareness, which is also a question of having an awareness of his torical identity. l'm a poet because I'm profondly Neapolitan. But | don't want to continue at. alato

interest. We've been talking about these themes and perimenting with them for years and years. | want to give my. thanks to Beuys, because today l've rediscovered a fellow traveller. And as a sign of this encounter | want to give him a copy of the first issue of Per esempio il sogno, Per esempio il mito. And It seems right to me to. make the same gift to Lucrezia. Thank you” Joseph Beuys: /'m the one who has to thank you.

Marco Bagnoli: “We imagine that we have awareness of the tree. And the tree itself may be a symbol of such awareness. My question for. Beuys is to ask him if this tree has awareness of us. And if this is so, isn't it the tree that, materially, plants us, by absorbing our awareness? And if it isn't, wouldn't the tree then be that external god who has died for the purpose of finding rebirth in our consciousness?”

Joseph Beuys: Thank you very much Marco. What you've implied is something with which | completely agree. In planting trees, we plant the tree and the tree plants us, since we belong together. It's something that takes place by moving in two different directions at the same time. So the tree has awareness, or consciousness, of us just as we have awareness of the tree. It's therefore extremely Important to try to create or stimulate an interest for these kinds of interdependencies. If we don't respect the authority, or the genius, or the intelligence of the tree, the tree has so much intelligence that it can decide to telephone a message about the sad state of human kind. The tree will give a call or two to the animals, to the mountains, to the 844

clouds, to the rivers; it will decide to talk with the power of geology, and if humankind fails, nature will take terrible revenge, most terrible revenge, and this will be an expression of nature's intelligence and an attempt to bring people back to clear reason by means of violence. people have no other choice than to remain confined within their stupidity and to give no consideration to the intelligence of nature, f they refuse to show any tendency to enter into cooperation ture, then nature will turn to violence to force human beings a different course. We're at a point at which we have to make

ision. Either we do it, or we don't. If we don't we'll be faced with rous catastrophies all over this planet. Cosmic intelligence will alnst humankind. But now, for a certain period of time, we still e possibility of making a free decision and of deciding to take Ourse thats different from the course we've travelled in the past. è can still decide to bring our own intelligence into line with the gence of nature. lm therefore very thankful for Marco Bagnoli's ks, because he has brought up an extremely important aspect o ‘oblem. Even though we can seem to be talking mysticism, in fact with reality. And it's surely a question of a kind entirely different from what goes by such a name in naterialistic ways of thinking. VVhenever people talk I always ask, “But what kind of reality are you

reality?” That is the question. Now, in conclusion, l've asked Italo Tomassoni to out this book of ours, /ncontro con Beuys" o Tomassoni: “Lucrezia'‘s introduction was a little bit abrupt since ny of the members of this audience may not have known, and still iy not know that this Defence of Nature was to be accompanied by the presentation of a book that | have to think of as almost exclusively a creation of Lucrezia's and Buby's. Within the framework of the system of cultural production that has characterized this book, I myself have simply contributed a theoretical introduction and a conclusion. This book represents ten or twelve years of activity in which Lucrezia and Buby have had a living experience with the work of Beuys, twelve years dedicated to the understanding of his work and the existential experience that goes into it. It's a book that shows us what is perhaps the most proper way of trying to make an approach to the work of Jose ph Beuys. And as we've been able to hear from the words that Beuys himself has spoken, his work can be thought of as representing an extremely radical position within the context of contemporary culture. We've quite clearly gone beyond the times in which it was typical for Beuys's audiences to give rise to scenes- of violent contrasts and disagreements. Thinking not only about what Beuys has said here today, but as well about the various statements made by others, it seems to me that this hall has been the scene for the establishment of an almost unanimous form of consensus. But | also have the feeling that it may be Beuys himself who'd like to call this consensus into question. | get this feeling not only from what he 845

has had to say this afternoon, but also from the statements he made earlier this morning in front of Lucrezia's home when he asserted that his system for conceiving of art, his system for conceiving of art in terms of anthropology, lies entirely outside of the concept of the avant-garde, and outside as well, of the concept of moderni If it's possible to point out a common and fundamental assum in everything that's been said here up until the present m

l'd say that this discussion has been characterized by precisel revolt against

modernity: And

Its hardly a matter

of our notions of the city; he talks to us, ab

of the concepts of culture that characterize

ofichance

*

as a denial

rid. He sees then

tree as fending off such concepts and sugges heir replacement with a new and truly contemporary system of‘culture that finds its. basis in a vision that's rooted in nature. Beuys presents nimSa within a tradition of thought that envisions a moment of. disintegration, and something has been said of Waltei we might also mention Nietzsche, Schopenha

and Beuys is clearly an ideal conclusion to thi concludes it though by rediscovering the poss organic forms of thought, and all of this has an radicality about it. Ve can see that Beuys has. concepts that are in open contrast with the conterdifii'ary world, and his dialectical position with respect to that world is the position of the great tradition of German romanticism. And all of this leads to the conclusion that he's fundamentally interested in creating a line of research that's based not on space—vwhich has been the basis of the research of all of the avant-gardes—but rather on time. Such a line

of research is clearly outside of the canonical lines of research of the avant-garde, which have by now been codified and even rnassified. Beuys has never been involved with spatially oriented research; his. research has never had anything to do with space at all; his research,

quite the contrary, has always been involved with time. And what kind of time? Today we've heard Beuys discuss a notion of time that reconnects with the cycles of eternity, a time that goes beyond illuministic notions of a rectilinear scansion of time, which is the way in which time is conceived in progressivistic and illuministic thought. Beuys talks of a form of time that's connected to the cyclic time that marks the rhythm and the beat of the seasons. The cak is all of this, and in drawing to a conclusion | can say that | think that Beuys exhibits a kind of predestination to paradox and radicality: he's a very great artist who has always stood for principles of dilatation and for existing out of the perimeter of the painting, but he also then reveals himself to be an artist who stands for a maximum of concentration and concentricity since he ridiscovers the centrality of the human individual. He rediscovers the centrality of consciousness. Beuys is an artist who has based his work on a political vision of 846

©

art, an ideological vision of art, but then he demonstrates—and in fact has said—that the force that ought to guide our actions isn't at all a question of ideology, and most particularly not a question of political ideology. We're to be guided by a far more profound notion the nature of mankind. Beuys has spoken frequently of art as a ruction of the specific forms of art, and thus of art as a lay vision ality, but here today he offers us a vision that Marco Bagnoli i properly underlined when he spoke of the death of God as a rsal point of reference. But at this point we have to say that God en resurrected since Beuys has quite clearly proposed a new pt or interpretation of the sacred. And now l’'d like to close with ark that will seem paradoxical. There's an emblem of Beuys nas struck me more than any other, and we're talking of an artist has a special propensity towards emblernatizing everything he and says and touches since he himself is a myth, a symbol, and nblem. The emblem that touched me more than any other is extremely beautiful photograph (among a number of extremely ul photographs made by Buby Durini) in which Beuys is seen dack looking out over a marvellous panorama, which is, | ma of Chieti and the mountains beyond it.VWe see him

his silhouette can only be described as dramatic This in one of the photographs that's reproduced book. There's another artist—and it may be dis a German artist—who came immediately to ting on this splendid image: that artist is Caspar iedrich too always looked at landscapes as though d someone's back. His communications were never toi through the useless and gaunt distortions of reality that we seive from the Impressionists and they were the vehicle of the istery of reality itself. It's perhaps in such an artist that we find a ‘source of the disquieting question that Beuys has placed before us here today. Thank you.

(From L. De Domizio, Difesa della Natura, Il Quadrante, Turin 1985)

Testimonials Beuys, Lucrezia, Buby Durini

Felix Baumann

Piazza Beuys at Bolognano The place is impervious. The small, self-sufficient town turns its bare outer walls, with rare interruptions of openings, few windows and almost inexistent doors, to the square. We cannot call it a “square” in the strictest sense ofthe word, which usually evokes a relatively flat surface, entirely surrounded by architectonic works. Especially in Italy, land known all over the world for her wonderful squares. Actually, it is difficult to define it a square. It is a terraced structure, whose single levels are connected by rather steep stairways: we seem to be in an open-air theatre, where the auditorium rises steeply across eye-catching wings. VVhich wings? You may well ask. Let us remain for a moment in a theatrical dimension, where the word “wings” includes the imagination and illusion of a papiermache world, of artifice, the stage where the real world appears but does not exist. Bolognano unveils a completely new world. Before our eyes, a primary and spontaneous nature appears. Our look sweeps over a gorge whose deepness we cannot really see, but can only guess, nevertheless taking our breath away. We are not in front of a high and impressive mountain, arousing exclamations of wonder and enchantment, but steep, wooded slope, that not far from the point of observation opens out onto a slightly rolling horizon.

What is striking is that this place remains impressed in our Memory. Perhaps because it is not particularly spectacular? Or because it does not characterize anything extraordinary? Several scenes similar to this one, existing especially in Italy, could be assumed as magnificent geological constellations. If we compare it with Matera, in Basilicata, with its clefts and crevices, Bolognano seems to be, in its topographical features, more rural and idyillic. In all sincerity, truth is different: this place remains engraved in our memory because it is named Beuys Square. Even in this perspective, doubts and wonders slip into our minds immediately: vhy should a square situated in an insignificant place, which never before in history imposed itself either on an economic or a cultural level, suddenly became a place of commemoration of one late 20th century's most significant artists?

\Vell, it wwas Beuys himself that decided it. In Bolognano the Defence of Nature operation began and ended. And once again in Bolognano he subsequently took inspiration for his main work Olivestone. Mainly because of his friendship with Buby and Lucrezia Durini, he 849

chose this place that he felt bare landscape of Abruzzo he in a correct humanity-nature humanity, bound to him by shape and “cultivate.

in harmony with, since in this rather could develop his ecological concepts context. He needed both: not only friendship, but also Nature he could

In this respect, Beuys Square is undoubtedly at the very intersection point in which, on one hand, human intervention—houses, terraces, consciously chosen and intentionally scarce trees—contrast with indomitable Nature. On both sides of the square we perceive the energies that now take shape; the row of houses, articulated in various groups, appears like a huge sculpture, as though from it the concept of “social sculpture," central in Beuys' work, emerged spontaneously, recognising creative power in the collectivity, rather than in the single individual. The facades, that suddenly appear to just out then retreat, are all alike, though each of them shows its own face; together they form a humble, bare, natural unity. And yet, a peculiarity emerges at once: the aim of the builders was that these houses, placed at the edge of a precipice, should remain united, supporting one another. Thus the Square evokes another essential concept in Beuys' thought, that is solidarity, including in the same measure individual freedom and collective equality. While the mechanisms of social conditions characterize the part of the Square that represents human work, the natural side is marked, on the other hand, by the antagonism of substance. The narrow gorge shows with exceptional clarity how the violence of water, the state of aggregation of the liquid, its movement, its formal essence are all stronger than the inorganic mass of stone, apparently destined to eternity. Both substances, however, are necessary for life, the liquid and the solid, the organic and the inorganic, as it is well shown by the trees growing in the most impervious point, almost a symbol of an irrepressible desire to live.

It is not casual that it was in Bolognano that Olivestone, Beuys' mature opus, was begun, uniting more than any other the elements suggested here, which are the foundations of the artist's creative principles. So we will try to describe, through brief formulae, the aforementioned concepts regarding this fundamental work, belonging to Beuys' later production. Friendship and solidarity Everything started with the friendship with Buby Durini. In his cellars Beuys discovered the traditional tubs used for pressing olive oil. If the artist had not shown interest in them, would the Baron have followed the exemplary ecological principles in his role of landlord with precise responsibilities? With his help Beuys completed, after several years, the action Defence of Nature initiated in 1975 with the Biological Plowing. 850

Social Sculpture Olivestone is an opus whose material roots are deep in the history of many centuries. Who moulded the first vats for decanting olive oil? Certainly we will never know the names of the craftsmen, who probably had no intention of creating a work of art, but an object for everyday use. Thanks to Beuys' intervention, however, a work of art was created, releasing it from the specific aim for which such tubs were originally created. Thus, as each of his actions derives from a philosophic reflection, even in this case the artist did not violate the integrity of what already existed, leaving unchanged the anonymous historical “social sculpture” that had inspired his re-interpretation.

Substance In his production Beuys often used the bipolarity of concepts, and Olivestone is based on this antagonism. The inorganic, cold, lifeless stone, artificially shaped, contrasts with oil—the symbol of life through warmth and the organic vegetal structure—that very slowly, with time, will corrode the lifeless stone, marking the triumph of the principle of panta rei (everything flows), very much like the mountain stream impetuously flowing down the gorge beneath Beuys Square. In other words, therefore, the substances symbolising life are stronger than those symbolising death, but their impetus is destructive.

Coming back to the Square, we have to remember that it was created by Lucrezia De Domizio in 1999, that is to say thirteen years after the artist's death, and, through a solemn ceremony, named after Joseph Beuys on May 12, the day of his birth. We have a feeling, though, that Beuys himself conceived and shaped the structure according to his principles, involving at the same time the forces of nature and the anonymous work of humanity. This simply reveals that the artist's friend and patron assimilated this patrimony of ideas so much that she was able to create Beuys Square in a manner that best harmonized with the pre-existing situation. A year ago Beuys would have celebrated his been eightieth birthday. The anniversary of his birth was barely celebrated in Germany. Only the Tubingen art gallery prepared a more complete exhibition devoted to Beuys, showing the magnificent collection of drawings The Secret Block for a Secret Person in Ireland, that had already been presented thirteen years ago in the same place. What has happened? Has artistic debate already deviated so much from Beuys' trust in the transitory forces of living and inanimate nature, to make us fear that the visionary from Kleve risks sinking into oblivion, because of the revival of pop art and of an artistic production that so often reflects in elusive longings for formulations of the consumer society? Really, Beuys aesthetics of material, that lives and breathes the spirit of Poor Art, detached from the supremacy of the electronic and technoid ostentation of Art in the nineties, contradicts the state of awareness currently dominating. Even the messianic 851

gravity of Beuys' social sensitivity and democratic ideal has become completely extraneous to the consumer and hedonistic society of the recently ended century. Interest in Beuys seems considerably reduced, however, not only in Germany, but in other centres of the Western artistic scene, such as the United States, England and France. The same mechanism can also be seen, on the other hand, in other artists: it often happens that the artistic debate drops to a lower level, after the death of artists who had been considered extraordinary creative forces during their lifetimes. In Beuys case, though, it seems curious that, during the reception of his production after his death, no contact occurred between the countries where he had operated. In Germany the fact that Beuys had an important following in Italy, where he created several works, is widely unknown. In Italy, on the other hand, particular attention is given to the “Italian Beuys," but we suspect that Southern Europe makes itself guardian of the artistic memory of this personage—who left a profound mark on the art and at the same time the philosophy of the 20th century—with a greater devotion than his native land. And indeed, is not Beuys Square in Bolognano significant proof of this affection? (From L. De Domizio, La Spiritualità di Joseph Beuys, Silvana Editoriale, Cinisello Balsamo 2002)

Lucrezia De Domizio and Joseph Beuys working at Villa Durini, San Silvestro Colli, Pescara 1978

Pippo Gianoni Semina di petali di rosa e Svizzera - 30 maggio 2004

ANNI

BEUYS

È

È

I

ia

dè 74

“=;

Pggt

è

dre

-

se

sul

ghiacciaio

del

Basodino

_

ce

a

_

s

‘ 40

ER

«e

we.

o

PS

Su -

gie.

E

—

a

-. POEMA

be

>

pe

Pi

must”

dr

ta

=

è n;

STi Hi

è

he:

«>

pas el

si -

*

a

Pa ne

Pd ® __ si

»

2

È

Cra

+

? i ©

s

ai

ea

|.

e

”

va

i

IS

ur

campo

;

è

La

_

o

di

di

ni

Po

sa pa Dt

—

-

fiori

-

si

—_

di

DOPO

m

ei

semi

»

na —

=_=

Aa

x

e

853

“si

Gian Ruggero Manzoni

Art Like Life in a Beyond to Joseph Beuys and to Lucrezia, masters, guides, friends...

Rising up, in the need to go on.

Many are the ways for us to touch the sky the way a tree does,

but there are only two wings that let us fly...

the humility, of simply telling others,

and the freedom to create one's own desires.

Humility directs us towards the absolute,

while freedom in art takes us to eternity.

He who believes this

Has truth for his time,

but gives something to the world

even after his death l

San Lorenzo di Luco, October 2010 854

Lucrezia De Domizio in Dusseldorf, near

Beuys's studio, 1973

Pierre Restany

The Good German | find it hard to speak of Beuys today without first remembering when and how we first met. I met Beuys around the mid-1950s in Dusseldorf thanks to Schemela, a German art dealer who was working on the opening of a gallery that would soon become quite famous. Beuys had neither the name nor the importance he has today. The first works | saw were his drawings, pencil drawings more or less allusive to Christ the man bearing his cross. Those drawings were proof of his evident graphic skill and at the same time of a profound existential angst. So my first recollection of Beuys is linked to the direct testimony of human suffering. This is something that always comes to mind every time | find myself admiring one of Beuys's works. In 1963, when | saw him take part in a two-man show with Nam June Paik at the Galerie Parnass in Wuppertal, | witnessed one of his longest performances, and on that occasion he spent hours in different yoga positions before two jars of margarine. These two visions are like a flash inside me, and give me a precise dimension of this figure's humanity. When Beuys held his major retrospective at the Guggenheim in New York, John Russell wrote a lengthy article for the New York Times in which he introduced the artist to the American public as “the good German par excellence” What exactly is, and what was at the time, “a good German”? A Socialist who was not a Communist, an anarchist not a territorist, a poet incapable of being a man of action. And it is true that Beuys the man has always been projected early in his work, like a sort of justification of the universal type and, indeed, Western Germany's regaining of the “good conscience” of a Democratic Weltanschauung. Of course, Beuys, as the greater defender of nature and the rector of the Free International University, a party activist separate from all parties, could make full-time use of a register liberating the imagination. But the “coyote man" had had the deep experience of solitude, starting from when he was a fighter pilot for the Luftwaffe in the Russian skies. His crash and rescue by Tartars thanks to felt blankets padded with animal fat vere certainly the sign of a certain type of redemption. After that the talent of only the greatest was released inside him, in other words, the combination of love and poetry. He was a poetic animal and | believe that he would have liked this definition. He had yearned to go back to an early state of nature, and wore a hat the way rabbits have ears. 856

Plate of Joseph Beuys's Studio in the Paradise Plantation at Bolognano

My approach to Beuys, beyond all the alias contrary to his career, was always determined by this sentiment of profound and direct humanity. Unsurprisingly, Beuys loved parable, metaphorical speech, but this was never gratuitous or merely aesthetic. Beuys's parables are stories, speeches, linguistic-visual systems oriented towards an end. This end is of the philosophical-moral sort. In Beuys's case the moral word is not meant as that of good or bad, but as the constant verification of the philosophy of human action. His works, parables, all have a moral principle and action. They act like the morals of fables. Beuys was a wonderful being because he was conscious of the practical and tangible power of poetry. He was a very special human being, whom | had the good fortune to meet, a man capable of making our lives better, that is, of giving us the only chance to feel stronger, to see farther ahead and to behave better. Now that art is becoming a more generalized phenomenon, we can meditate on Marcel Duchamp's famous words: “Art is everywhere, as long as you meet with it” Today we can say that art is everywhere as long as you know how to use it, and for this progress in our awareness of the world we can be grateful to Joseph Beuys, a good German, a great citizen of the world and a unique artist. (RISK arte oggi, no. 7 May/June special edition 1992 Homage to Joseph)

Inauguration of Piazza Beuys, Bolognano May 181999

For me Joseph Beuys wasn't just an artist, a prophet, a man of synergy; he was also a brother who had the gift of saying the right things at the right time and who, for those willing to listen, also gave directions for the road along which to channel ones energies. As he was a “machine that created, he was also a Model of this self-suggestion that characterizes all autodidacts, which we thankfully continue to be, and that preserves for us this capacity without which “actions” would be controlled by fear. Academy without him is just a pipe dream: without the genius of living the moment, space, material, the interrelations between nothing and everything there is no true teaching. Harald Szeemann 858

Harald Szeemann

For Buby Durini. For a rare person The anarchist Bakunin, during the period he spent in the Canton of Ticino in Switzerland, still dreamt of a revolution which would have led to a free world governed by evolved men. During his sojourn in Locarno, however, he was not so much concerned in having contact with the working class as he was in assiduously frequenting the middle class and ecclesiastical circles of the zone. These were evidently the people who were the most attentive interlocutors for the ideas and the vision of the world which inspired the Russian anarchist. During the by now famous “Una discussione” (A discussion) between Enzo Cucchi, Anselm Kiefer and Jannis Kounellis, held in Basel in June 1985, Kounellis—somewhat forsakenly—invoked the “bourgeois:” with this he meant the individual attracted by the solitary artist, by the tragic genius. Kounellis' definition, really a little clumsy, certainly embodied the indication of a synthesis of individuality: the interlocutor, the patron, the successful business man and the art connoisseur. The tone of “Una discussione” was undoubtedly heightened during the second part (held in the autumn of the same year) in which also Joseph Beuys took part, already seriously ill. Beuys pointed out to his colleagues that lack of acceptance is not a problem for the artist provided, however, that he really does what is right for him, that what he does always tends towards the maximum of possibilities: then the artist is an entity who is independent from the preceptive phase of the work that he produces. There is no point in admitting limits of level because “the only limit which really exists is the limit of cognition!" Art has to be anthropological otherwise it no longer corresponds to its day.This inexorability not only furnished Beuys with incomprehension but also a militant company: persons who shared his broadened conception of art. In fact, he had the privilege to conquer the heart of a gentleman. A gentleman who had the greatness to leave “active life,’ the initiative, to his impulsive wife—Lucrezia—who with vehemence, farsightedness and intelligence in Beuys discovered the Artist. And she helped him because she intuited that he would have changed the present into the future. It was in this way that they became the ideal couple for Beuys while for Lucrezia and her husband he became their ideal travelling companion. How much poorer Beuys' life would have been without the experiments in nature! Without the Baron, Giuseppe Durini, without Lucrezia and her love for nature, without the land in the Abruzzi and the house in the Seychelles: it is probable that also the experimentation in grand style “with” and “in” the earth, with plants, would have come to nothing. Although Buby Durini was the exemplary interlocutor also because he was a biologist, in the same way he became the indispensable and always omnipresent testimony at the appearances and interventions of the artist because he was also an untiring photographer and video cameraman. What Kounellis had individuated as a rare good was reality for Beuys: the reasonable and sensible friend who kept himself out of the limelight but who made everything possible. A double portrait exists which dates 859

to 1982, Beuys and Buby are in a frontal position, to friends holding shoulders: the man with the hat stares directly at the lens, Buby, radiant with joy, keeps his eyes closed. And a photograph of 1973 exists which portrays both of them from behind while walking towards the villa of San Silvestro Colli in Pescara: “This house is yours“The friendship of the host is the dimension of the very old and present-day hospitality which needs no comment. The affection and esteem that Buby and Lucrezia felt for Beuys did not so much lead to purchases of works “from a distance” as it did to a road to be run together, to the third way which does not form part of the triangle of ownership represented by Atelier-Gallery-Museum. Incontro con Beuys (Meeting with Beuys, 1974), Aratura Biologica (Biological Plowing, 1976), the Fondazione dell'Istituto per la Rinascita dell'Agricoltura (Foundation of the Institute for the Rebirth of Agriculture, 1978), the Italian edition of the FI.U. (Free International University) publications, in particular the fundamentally important manifesto entitled Azione Terza Via (Third Way Action, 1978), the South-North- South operation of Grassello (White lime, 1979), the tropical experience of the Beuys family on Praslin in the Seychelles with the cultivation of palms as different as the Coconut and the Coco de Mer (1980-81) which was the starting point for the grand action entitled 7000 eichen (7000 Oaks) at Kassel (1982), the cultivation of trees and shrubs threatened with ex tinction as part of the ecological action Difesa della Natura (Defence of Nature, 1982), the labeled FI.U. operations such as Wine, the Motorcar, the Shovel and Oil (1983-84), the Bolognano debate (1984) and the old troughs for the decanting of oil which would subsequently have been used for the masterly work entitled Olivestone, created for the Castello di Rivoli (1984) and today to be found in the Kunsthaus of Zurich, donated by Lucrezia and Buby. Joseph Beuys died in 1986. Buby had chosen to honour his memory (as is only right for a Great Personality) and with Lucrezia's energy had in the periodical f/SK arte oggi developed Beuys' concepts of creativity, the will and desire to understand the present for a better future. The donation of Olivestone to the Kunsthaus of Zurich was a further act of love. Lucrezia was seriously ill and wanted Olivestone—almost as if it were an "exvoto"—to be transferred to the same city where she would have undergone her surgical operation. The Kunsthaus had also been foreseen by Beuys as the permanent seat of the work in the event that the Piedmont Region had not seen to its regular purchase. | still remember when Buby telephoned to tell me about the intention of donating the work. He simply said it. He was very worried about the health of his Lucrezia and wanted the wish of her friend to be granted. In the meantime one no longer has had negative rays and negative energy following the bequest of Beuys' work. The aura of Buby Durini, and his modesty, shines out all the more when faced by the creative force of who has offered the South the model of the free circulation of goods and ideas-not to enrich himself but in order to donate this model to the world by way of the figure of Beuys. In the wake of the great spiritual emotions of the past, Christianity and Humanism, Joseph Beuys found it in the way of light. It was not fortuitous that he wanted Buby to document both his public and personal Image when at the apex of his success—in 1979—on the 860

Joseph Beuys signing Difesa della Natura, May

13 1984

occasionof the organization and inauguration of the exhibition held at the Guggenheim Museum in New York. Those by now famous photographs are the language of a man who was an expert of life, a language that does not expound a style of any kind but which captures life and gives It its “breath, as a third dimension that confers profundity to the twodimensional photographic reproduction. On Christmas Day of 1994, the result of a heart attack, Buby Durini died in the splendour of the colours of the flora and fauna of the Indian Ocean. All of us who knew him now miss him because Buby indicated a path along which all the intellectuals worthy of this term ought to meditate. And in going along this path he has shown us how it is possible to grow. (From L. De Domizio,

L’Obiettivo dell'Arte di Buby

Durini, Charta, Milan 1997, and L. De Domizio,

Pensatore Selvaggio, Silvana Editoriale, Cinisello Balsamo 2005)

Harald Szeemann.

Il

Una and Ingeborg Szeemann - March 2011

Pierre Restany

A memory of a dear friend My memory of Buby Durini is a wonderful one, in all senses. Because Buby was a beautiful person, he was a true man. A legend of being a great international playboy surrounded him but, to be quite honest, he was above all a man of the sea. The sea was his passion. He also had close ties with nautical culture in general and was a member of the exclusive club called “Fratelli della Costa” (Brothers of the Coast). Only one of the many clubs in which during his formidable life this man was virtually or actually enrolled. The things which have most remained impressed in my memory are above all the discussions during my sojourn in the Seychelles, the guest of Buby and of his wife Lucrezia De Domizio. Every now and again we slipped off to drink a beer together. In this way | had the possibility of getting a completely personal idea of Buby by way of those precious fragments of his memory which from time to time he conceded in his conversations with other people. He could have been a master of narration because he was gifted with a sense of humour and a fertile imagination. Buby, instead, had projected this narrative and descriptive bent of his into photography, which had become the ideal means for materializing and verifying the intense and daily relationship he had with life. His photographic shot avoided the sensational: as far away as could be from the idea of the wealthy “paparazzo. For Buby Durini photography was a supplementary instrument at the disposal of his sensitivity and emotivity. His photographs always and only live within a dimension of warm-hearted and friendly complicity with the person portrayed, they are never arrogant. He never tried to represent his models—vwho were also his friends—in monumental or spectacular poses. It was always the simplicity of being and its truth that Buby looked for. This humanity, this profound respect for the other person, was translated into smiling and happy images, into an atmosphere of real well-being. Buby cared a great deal about the encounter with happiness-even if one can't say that he tried to rouse this feeling in others. He simply wanted other people to appear with him in a humanly beautiful and serene contact. I remember that during our conversations we talked about people, stories and legends of the Seychelles. The islands of the southern seas are the ideal place for imagining fantastic adventures, the treasures and caves of Ali Baba, which in the contagion of the nature and the environment end up by appearing likely. Buby revealed them to me bit by bit. Legends which were always extremely individual and fabulous. What is certain is that Buby didn't need to go hunting for these adventurers in order to find existential models. In fact, he loved artists perhaps due to this superreality produced by their minds being open to the unknown, by their transcendent possibility. The meeting with Beuys-in this sense-must have been intense and profound in its truth. I have a vision of Buby which | could define as having been morally healthy. When he gave suggestions to help me control my drinking, for 864

example, he showed gifts of temperance and openly brought out his training as a biologist and scientist. On those occasions he showed the man who really knew how to combine the imperatives of science with the existential outbursts which every individual nurses deep down. Also this part of Buby Durini—more coordinated, more structured—formed part of his interior diversity and increased his fascination. Anotner of Buby's qualities was his knowing how to listen to people. He knew how not to interrupt the person talking to him, he was prepared to let the person open his or her heart and specify his or her opinions to the very limit, even if Buby often didn't share these opinions in the least. This is a really great virtue. Buby Durini was the man of anti-censorship, of freedom of the spirit. In the chaotic, excessive and abusive world in which we live this reference to the man who knew how to listen and hear people takes on an exemplary value. To feel oneself the accomplice of different existential modalities: this was his human dimension. For him clubs “of the different” didn't exist. Love for nature, the listening to people and diffused generosity were the instruments by way of which to meet his fellow-men. If a friend had a difficulty then Buby knew—and without hesitation—how to help. In the right way, at the right time and with the due discretion. This is a type of love for others which is really quite rare today. Iwould also like to mention his sense of humour. Very often when talking with Lucrezia, especially when caught up in the enthusiasm which she exuded for this or that other Mr. “X" —very often an artist—Buby would look at the person with a mysterious smile and would say: “Lucrezia has entered the phase of ‘X' addiction” This humorous detachment from the existential strategy and from Lucrezia's work militancy was on his part only the testimony of a great freedom—of respect for the freedom of other people. In this sense Lucrezia and Buby formed a really beautiful couple, charming to meet. Extremely modern in their flexibility, Lucrezia and Buby displayed a reciprocal respect, an internal syntony of two parallel freedoms. The life of the couple is compromised to such an extent today: on the one hand it is too easy to fall into moralistic formalism while, on the other, to give way to sentimental indifference.The coexistence system of Lucrezia and Buby was instead based on frankness and veracity. When | think of Buby | lose my sense of time. He doesn't appear to me as being an image of the past. On the contrary, he is still a strong presence in my memory. When | was with him | felt at ease and was in no hurry whatsoever to communicate any sort of message, to make myself understood regarding any particular question. | felt as if |were inmy home and the rhythm of the discussion became fluid, relaxed. This feeling of comfort in self-responsibility is the ideal condition for forgetting present time. When thinking about him | once again find this intellectual wellbeing: this is why he is a dear memory. Buby and | don't “see” each other often, although we do with regularity. Quickly and easily we recreate our communication network. It is the thread of Ariadne of our relationships, by way of personal labyrinths. It is a contingent need. With his death | feel the lack of this dialogue space. And | believe that in the same way it must be lacking for all of his real friends: those who formed part of his real or else imaginary clubs. 865

Inorderto try to express Buby Durini's spiritual path orroad with ametaphor, to express that eternal condition of his earthly humanity, | see him walk from one of his clubs to another: from the sea to art, from art to the dreams of adventure, and from adventure to nature. Because Buby respected nature in the same way he respected people. And lm prepared to bet that he has left a both intense and precious Memory to his farm workers of the Abruzzi. Buby was a real man. Once one used to say “a goodwilled man.” A type of man, in whatever case, who is increasingly more rare on this earth. Who when he leaves us, leaves an unreplenishable vacuum in his friends. One feels his absence. Only compensated—and never sufficiently—by the memory of the great humanity of the person. This profound sense of humanity creates a semantic bond for the memory, it creates this affective colour in both memory and feeling. He will always be close to me when it is a question of strong and beautiful human situations. In my thought Buby has conquered the absolute right to share the rare moments with me in which one feels proud to be part of the club of human beings. (From L. De Domizio, L'Obiettivo dell'Arte di Buby Durini, Silvana Editoriale, Cinisello Balsamo 1997)

Buby Durini and Pierre Restany on Praslin, Seychelles, March 1992

866

Panos Spartan Papadolias

Beuys: The Last Prophet Lucrezia De Domizio: The Missionary Contemporary man: a tragic figure, with no identity, is going through a deep crisis, far from the source of his existence. As the margins of time grow shorter, he must go back to this source: to Truth, Nature and to the Nature itself of Man. Joseph Beuys. A nomad of Art chose to create, and to do so by using the raw materials of man's tragedy. An independent Voice that defended itself with every ounce of human and natural strength. An intimately political being, a profound humanist, who chooses as his mission man's return to the Truth. A great project which he devotes himself to with no limits. Actually extending any limits, exhausting them, suppressing them, he transforms his own life into Art and Art becomes one in his path on this Earth. His materials? Fleeting, humble, often incorporeal. His methods? Anti-conventional and not particularly orthodox. His mindset? Radical. A philosopher? A pedagogue? A poet? A researcher? “A transmitter who transmits”? An intellectual—star of communication? A sculpture? A continuous performance? A provocative eccentric agent? An artist/anti-artist? “I have always thought of Beuys as a diamond. A diamond is multifaceted; and because each facet is transparent it makes all the other facets visible, notwithstanding its compactness and unity (L.D.D.) Twenty-five years after his death the Beuys case is unique. Strictly linked to his charisma, depending to the highest degree on his physical presence and words. Beuys's work—despite the fact that it was deprived of its “driving force"— is just as alive and topical as ever: a constant danger signal as well as an invitation to adopt a position of responsibility at a time when, once more, Humanity comes face to face with a new cycle of cultural crises. Artist. A one-dimensional and restrictive term when we speak of Beuys. He goes against (traditional) Art, and yet he exalts its role and dynamics: that of a new Art, one that knows no boundaries. He believes in it, he practices it, he declares that it is a springboard of social transformation. Sculpture evolves into social sculpture. Education and Communication are his basic tools. It is precisely his extended interpretation of Art that makes him a unique case, so that today the artist and his work have a unique dimension. Beuys's mission is clear: to redefine the human element, identifying biography with creation: Every man is an artist. Lashing out with fearless creativity in all directions, in his path and in the unfolding of his work, he reveals an unsinkable faith in mankind, building a bridge between Art and Politics, where experiences are relived, evil calls for care and insight to open up new paths for a public domain available to all men. By using symbolisms and allegories, via unconventional messages, Beuys warned us of present-day man's poor, self-destructive choices, entering like lightning onto the artistic scene, but also onto contemporary reality: a true prophet who, by way of his own work, predicted and focused on all of the greatest problems of society, politics, the economy, culture and especially the environment. Aspects which have all taken a tragic turn. His voice is a cry of distress, but it is also a message of hope, a raising of consciousness, an appeal to creative responsibility because we are the revolution. “The entire third millennium will be rooted in Beuysian thinking. For as long as there is a single plant and a single man on planet Earth, the noble art of Joseph Beuys will exist” (L.D.D.) 867

I

n

0

$

|

>

x

vi

%

ep

è

Cote vati dle ra n dii

t

È

a

4

3 ì

i

}

\

’

j

é

Î

É

x

I i

I

ì

Ì

|

| i

Ì i

|

Ì ,

tig

di Cara

À

|

k ;

i Ì|

i

_

ma’

{I

Î

fi a

î

È iI

° —n

n

|

{ L

Humus analysis, 1983

Calcium Carbonate distribution, 1983

Waybill. Wine transport

Waybill. Wine transport

870

Wine analysis, 1983

European Community. Transport permit

(F.LU DIFESA

DELLA

NATURA

VBIO MONTIRUICIANO D'ABRUZZO.

V.A.2 1983

Wine FI.U. plate 871

N | FLV ini | DrestDLAMInEA

Cic

i|

atei]

ti

so

=

‘i

grato.

{pietra

lipo Mak s

lidemmia Mii

sian lato

7 per

F.LU.

F.L.U. |

DIFESA DELLA NATURA NrO vorTALEIO PAAZZI

F.L.1

F.LU.

DIFESA DELLA NATURA

|

DIFESA DELLA

DIFESA DELLA NATURA

ao vomanao

F.LU. DIFESA DELLA NATURA

|

MIO Mom ERO PAZZO

DIFESA DELLA NATURA vo vseminso vano

| |

_

Vai. Thcp

F.LU.

F.LU.

DIFESA DELLA NATURA

| DIFESA DELLA

SES

do T, (ro

“—

|

Vai"Th pi

ZAA

DIFESA DELLA

NATURA

DIFESA DELLA

seen

Ì

no

NATURA

DIFESA DELL

2

derT) ser

Vasi!)

er

bt

evi

a

DIFESA DELLA NATURA

lat)

FILU.

NATURA

Ì | 401,T) ep

I

DIFESA DELLA NATURA \eo vorra tUO DUDAZTI

DIFESA DELLA

NATURA

(er i fap Ì

riv

e

e

DIFESA DELLA NATURA

temp 0

DIFESA DELLA

|

Tp

SEO O

e

NATURA

0%

DIFESA

e

DELLA NATURA

Vitin fe

E.LU. | F.LU |F.LU | FLUO È DIFESA DELLA NATURA

|

Mo Loris piprID

DIFESA DELLA NATURA | Vo vomito pleno

tem dep! |dep vl Cnn siontiscenicenincenioni

DIFESA DELL'A NATURA a wemucve Drpo

tut

| DIFESA DELLA NATURA VTO orco per

(Ip I pop tir nrvir nre

tiri

dare

t1rr

DIFESA DELLA NATURA

|

No vomito Damato

DIFESA DEI \r0 vor

Peep)

—__——___m—_—_—n=

Ri;ÎU.

|

a voTALOMO DaemuzzO

7% Gp!

DIFESA DELLA NATURA

DIFESA DELLA NATURA

ccicitctrn

F.LU.

see

Fw n

F.LU.

È p:

DIFESA DELLA NATURA | viD USTILIRINO FiiTO

DIFESA DELLA NATURA: N 110 voti DIO

mill

ne

Pra dep! | Ty ep! zzin

ve

F.LU. | F.LU. NATURA | i enza tr) Ì

DIFESA DELLA NATURA 0 vormUcLO Dime

|

fopp7) ti) Ga

|

DIFESA DELLA NATURA Mo verme pae}

qa

| (|

DIFESA DELLA NATURA no Lom tO DAEITO

Mem!| |

|

o:

irene

F.L.U.

F.LU. DIFESA DELLA NATURA a

TICINO pane)

v

"i

DIFESA DELLA NATURA ven

DIFESA DELLA NATURA

|

mTUR—LO DieRSD

ii n

U | F.IU

EU.

DIFESA DELLA NATURA

fermo

FI

DIEESA DELLA nana |

DIFESA DELLA NATURA \P0 votRONO vaImUETO.

"Tp pes, | dm

Po L) (>

Ì

Data. le

|

10 USTTALONO DATO

|

PIÙ

DIFESA DELLA NATURA Wo vati ico DabEZO

Vasi ep

|

|

DIFESA DELLA NATURA Vr Vesti EUNO DATO

Fiu | riu | FLU | FLU | FLU DIFESA DELLA NATURA 1a vert IO DATO

|

DIFESA DELLA NATURA VO om pasRTIO

Vaia” Il pu tp!

Wi

riu

‘A NATURA DO TANZI

fem Li sue

DIFESA DELLA NATURA VID Vor RCANO D AERITO

1

DIFESA DELLA NATURA

vò vorTLALO Darò

Mo Uomo CANO DaemITTO.

ep

eni

ELU | DIFESA DELLA NATURA

DIFESA DELLA NATURA VO vorTIANO DURUETO

0% Il Zeta |

riu | ei

DIFESA DELLA NATURA

dp

|

Vai)

(rp

|

opp

| F.LU

DIFESA DELLA NATURA VID LOTTO DADIUZZO

DIFESA DELLA NATURA VIa vom CNO Pn)

Py 0%

|

Ta n fe%,

| Fiv | iu | E.LU

DIFESA DELLA NATURA

DIFESA DELLA NATURA

VITOLot ENO DaLZZO.

Ì

|

feto È

Vai"7

le

|

DIFESA DELLA NATURA

VD VoIRA CUD DAssLITO

]

Vas) sar

|

DIFESA DELLA NATURA 24

mo vat RUO DAERIIO

|

Ip

139 LomIUICANO DaeaZz)

0%

da ) e

ini

| F.LU DIFESA DELLA NATURA 4. |

F.I.U. DIFESA DELLA NATURA

EU

| FIU

DIFESA DELLA: NATURA

10 vonTUeLO casATO

DIFESA DELLA NATURA PD MONTI CURO DARIO

Sl (ep

Val ‘titti

sure

la ipo

lisa

anti tac tua cri

FIU |

FIÙ

DIFESA DELLA NATURA \rd vomirioso Dasnizzo.

(Ip dirti

dep ren

|

DIFESA DELLA NATURA To vom co Paseo

Dati

| I

lisa) Î

PRORERISIRIN

Communication and a pedagogical character are the essential features of Beuys's works, capable of influencing and inspiring students, intellectuals, art enthusiasts and ordinary men. His encounter with Lucrezia and Buby Durini predicted something great from the start; Lucrezia De Domizio Durini especially was ready to understand and embrace with the same passion her Master's revelatory message protect the flame. Today, the Art Community finds itself at a stage where it is interpreting Beuys's work in an attempt to piece it together but also to decipher his philosophy. Lucrezia De Domizio Durini has used every ounce of her energy to keep Beuys's voice alive in the same environment where he worked, against the fears of men by using the tools of communication and dialogue. From the very start Lucrezia De Domizio Durini understood Beuys's work from every single perspective, disseminating it to the four corners of the world and, luckily, in Greece too.

“The journey | was on when | first met Beuys totally changed my life. Defence of Nature is a work of crucial importance for the dissemination and understanding of Beuysian thinking” (L.D.D.) The Greek Experience I say that we only live once on this planet as living organisms, and this is why the place where we live is so important. (Joseph Beuys) Is it easy to open your eyes and spread your wings—especially in the guise of the artist—when the place where you live is a small town in Greece? Is it easy to trigger off creativity while changing the course of one's own life and, fatally, influencing one's own environment? | used to think it was too hard to do anything of the kind. Today | realize that whoever wants to can trigger his own creativity in a responsible way and make use of his freedom without restrictions, influenced by a crucial factor: “encounters” that build “bridges/ and in my case it was enough to plant a seed in my country fertilized by Beuysian thought. Sparta. A small city that before the historic greatness of its name, as time passed, has lost its cultural and economic identity. My encounter with Lucrezia De Domizio Durini and my initiation to the Beuysian conception of the world allowed me to find right there, along the pathway of Art, a concrete dimension by way of an event that was capable of valorising the country and stimulating Society in multifarious ways: Man-Environment, Man-History, Man-Economics and, of course, Man-Man. This inspired a Festival for the gradual rebirth of Sparta. It was 2007 and the Festival Laconia: Arthumanature Topos / Defence of Nature is a fact. Three days during which Art emphasized, indicated, unveiled hidden dynamics and laid the first stone of a new reality. The journey began and Lucrezia De Domizio Durini was the intellectual guide. Beuys's thinking was disseminated in actions, works, in human communication: Lucrezia De Domizio Durini was Beuys's present thought, a thought that opens new paths, fights prejudice in a total respect for the country and men, with simplicity and love, For a healthy future. The first day of the Festival was dedicated to the Olive Feast in the village

of Sellassìa with the symbolic planting of an olive tree and the inauguratio n of the installation Sellassìa. Lucrezia De Domizio Durini conveyed new ideas, choices, her own responsible behaviour towards human society in the furrow of Beuysian thought for which there will be no end. On the second day of the Festival Lucrezia De Domizio Durini presented the work Casacielo by Mario Bottinelli Montandon and in the Cultural Centre

building coordinated the Discussion “Encounter with Beuys and His Work”

On day three the action was relocated to Gherachi, northeast of Sparta, where

the local economy is based on the production of olive oil and hand-weav ing. 876

Panos Papadolias, Lucrezia is Beuys Voice previous pages Incontro con Beuys volume, Joseph Beuys, 1984; Bottiglia di vino Wéhlt die Grinen, Joseph Beuys. The Art of Cooking volume, 1999

Joseph Beuys, Vino EI.U. 100 cartoni + foto sculpture, 1983

A number of artistic interventions took place: the placing of the bottle of oil Defence of Nature - Joseph Beuys in the oil factory, the presentation of the work Horizon by the sculptor Costas Varotsos, the planned Promenade, with a display of carpets on the people's private balconies—for an explosion of colours—the permanent display of bronze books by Giulio De Mitri, my own installation that involved a twin ceremony with the gateway to Gherachi and the entrance to Palazzo Durini in Bolognano, the performance of ballet dancer and choreographer Dimitris Sotirion and, lastly, the great feast in the square with music, traditional dances and local food. Lucrezia De Domizio Durini participated intensely, energized by the people's creativity; she brought art to the present, to the everyday, to within man's own needs. The Festival ended with a concert by Umberto Petrin at the Sainopoulio Amphitheatre and an intervention by Lucrezia De Domizio Durini at the heart of everything, like a profoundly anthropocentric seal, was Beuys's thinking. In October 2008, the opening of the exhibition “Olivestone” at the Museum of the Olive and of Greek Olive Oil in Sparta was an invitation to the awareness of a historic moment in which the work Olivestone is like a crucial phase in a more esoteric reading of things, an opportunity for reflection and research: a decisive moment for the visitor who Beuys asked to soak absorbent paper in oil based on his or her own creativity, in order to immerse ourselves at a deeper level in

a revelatory experience. In the spring of 2009 Olivestone was at the Oil Industry Museum on the island of Lesvos. From the historic experience at the FIAC in Paris in 1984 to its donation to the Kunsthaus in Zurich, Olivestone launches continuous stimuli that help to disseminate Beuys's epoch-making thinking. But such an intense day must come to an end. | watch Lucrezia De Domizio Durini, that indefatigable person. Industriousness? Diligence? A sense of duty? A “sacred” mania? Simply the identification between Art and Life? If Beuys filled his existence with Art, Lucrezia De Domizio Durini chose “a life with a destination": to restore to life and practice her master's deep anthropological thinking. Not just by way of university chairs and in the rooms of museums, but also in open spaces, fully accepting the seed of this thinking. In creating the great unifying synthesis of these projects, with Beuys's philosophy and work as a common denominator, it is difficult to actually assess such a multifaceted experience, which | shared as a curator together with Lucrezia De Domizio Durini. However, it is already clear that the sensitivity and penetrability of Beuysian philosophy found Lucrezia De Domizio Durini to be an exceptional channel, a channel through which the work of the German master has been able to reach an unparalleled and inexhaustible understanding in time.

Athens/Sparta, November 8, 2010

878

Harald Szeemann

For Lucrezia — Guard the Flame When Emma Kunz (1892-1963) was asked if she did not feel close to anthroposophy, she laid her hands on Rudolf Steiner's works, and refused to go to Dornach to join the local anthroposophist association, though she sensed its positive intentions. Emma Kunz was a healer, and she obtained innumerable and surprising successes even when she treated patients using traditional medicine. She was the only person able to affect Nature thanks to the direct effect of her spiritual forces and energies, and to lead any phenomenological interpretation of artistic representations ad absurdum, by (documented) flower polarization, on the basis of aesthetic and ethical rules. Emma Kunz produced arguments and raised the objections against Rudolf Steiner (1861-1925) that led to the foundation of an association led him to lower himself to the condition of it members, in order to raise these latter to the spiritual level he desired for them. Rudolf Steiner's influence on Joseph Beuys is well known. Beuys was a member of the Anthroposophic Association, who welcomed him as a philosopher, though not as an artist. Rudolf Steiner supplied new stimuli, not only to art and architecture, but also to other sectors, such as pedagogy, curative pedagogy, therapeutic eurhythmics, art-therapy, agriculture, as well as to the social question. Beuys was particularly struck by the theory of the tripartition of social organization. Like Steiner, his aim was to infuse warmth and a new spiritual light into humanity. Steiner, Kunz and Beuys, kept the humanity flame high continuously nourishing it by their work. Unlike Steiner, who created the Goetheanum for his activity, the low-profile and unconventional Emma Kunz and Joseph Beuys forfeited the structure of a building. And vet the stable constructions Beuys created during his lifetime—including Darmstadt's Beuys-Blockstadt, which is the most impressive—may well be considered as his complex plastic testament, which in its meaning, however, induces us to desire a larger “breathing space” for his works. Actually, they are mostly housed at travelling and temporary exhibitions. On the other hand, a person healed by Emma Kunz in the past, now manages a meeting place in her Memory, near the stone quarry where she discovered the therapeutic Aion A rock. Bolognano became something similar after Joseph Beuys's death. Here, on the estate of Baron Giuseppe Durini, during his lifetime the artist was able to carry out his cultivation, the result of thorough ecological studies, as well as to create works obtained from the materials the place offered. Beuys's work was intensely supported by Lucrezia De Domizio, Baroness Durini, and described in innumerable publications. Thanks to her efforts, in Bolognano, Beuys Square has taken the place of the town dump, Defence of Nature has been replaced by the Paradise Plantation and her very home has become la casa di lucrezia, a “living” homage to the artist; not to mention, moreover, that in 2001 Bar oness Durini obtained from the Republic of San Marino the issue of a special stamp devoted to the Master, as an acknowledgement for an eminent 20th century anthropos, who, like the greatest artists, tried to eliminate the contradictions of new man's androgyny. And the opus O/ivestone, kept in Bolognano, is in this sense his most effective result. (From L. De Domizio Durini, Bolognano. La Spiritualità di Joseph Beuys, Silvana Editoriale, Cinisello Balsamo 2002)

879

Perre Restany

After Beuys | think that it must have been very difficult for Lucrezia De Domizio to deal with the question of Joseph Beuys's cultural heritage. After having shared the many important projects that are so well known, when Beuys died, in 1986, Lucrezia perceived very clearly inside herself the personal and spiritual responsibility of Post-Beuys that is the responsibility of actively keeping the memory of the German Master alive. The main problem was never a material one, that is a problem of works of art, or of difficult situations involving Beuys's family, but that of keeping the substance and structural articulation of his message “flying high” For despite the fact that Beuys's message is planetary and has a humanitarian extension, it is also true that Lucrezia's first preoccupation, in her ponderous memorial work, has always been to preserve the quality she had perceived as fundamental in her relations with the artist: namely the human dimension. Bolognano was, and still is, the geographic emblem of the “cult of memory” rendered to Beuys. It was because Beuys went there in person several times, and still is because its Mayor, Claudio Sarmiento, a young man who became sensitive to art mainly because of the presence of the German Master, continues to endow the homage with an official nature. It does not seem possible that Bolognano, this little village in the province of Pescara, may actually act as anchorage point for all the commemorative activity dedicated to one of the greatest artists of the 20th century. Personally, | believe that the humbleness of this place, which is actually only apparent, is a very important element. How regal these ancient stones are, and how unexpected and unequivocal it reveals itself to be, almost by magic... We all realized this, with the metamorphosis of the old Durini mansion, when in 1999 it became /a casa di lucrezia.This “art palace” betrays no vein of “Lucretian narcissism/' it simply is the concrete realization of a spiritual choice: to build a house where Beuys may continue to live ... not with in body, obviously, but in spirit, through his most important expressions: his works, his writings, his books, his photographs. In short, it is a sort of memorial, and itis Lucrezia's work, carried out with absolute commitment and devotion, almost a sort of adoration. What she was able to evoke and indicate to everybody else was Beuys's substantially humanitarian dimension, what she intends to promote is the great humanity of his message. The metamorphosis of the palace represents, therefore, a sort of wonderful “operation of humanism," in the most precise Beuysian meaning. It is difficult, when a great personality like Beuys dies, not to fall 882

previous pages Joseph Beuys planting the First Italian Oak for the Defence of Nature operation, Bolognano, May 13,

1984

into a sort of passive memory, that we could calla nostalgic cult. Lucrezia managed avoid this thanks to two things: her love for Beuys and the intelligence of the permanent testimony rendered to his message. Thus she created the conditions for a place of memory that, besides dignity, also has historical objectivity. It is, therefore, a positive, active memory. | actually had the chance to verify this dynamic process of Beuys's memory in person during the inauguration of Lucrezia's house: the most pleasant moments were always those in which, more than anything else, we felt the human presence. Of that evening | particularly remember the fireworks, with the participation of the whole village; it seems to me that that moment may well sum up the natural fervour and human warmth that always surround a planetary message. The deepest quality of memory is indeed its spontaneous, direct nature, rooted in space and time. To this space-time called Bolognano Lucrezia gave an additional cultural root, that of Beuys: the land of Bolognano has received it with true eagerness and pleasure, the landscape displays it with honour and its inhabitants safeguard his memory with dignity. This represents, in my opinion, the most positive result of Lucrezia's “post-Beuysian” work. We can extract some events taken from the “story” Lucrezia De Domizio keeps telling the world, projects implemented, like the edition of stamps devoted to Beuys by the Republic of San Marino, or like the presence of Olivestone at the latest Venice Biennale—an emblematic presence, considering the orientation Harald Szeemann gave to his two Bienniali——where Beuys' work experiences a truly universal dimension. Then there is the naming of the Joseph Beuys Square in Bolognano, and we should not forget the books. The entire activity of Lucrezia as critic and cultural analyst, in short, is marked by references to Beuys. This is proved, among other things, by Risk, an instrument of her active thought for an “art-today” having its roots in Beuysian thought. The people who do not like her may comment with irony the visceral loyalty that Lucrezia maintains with strength and rigour. But such irony, in the end, is not fundamental: what importance should the people of culture give to frivolous, superficial things, not thought by the head, nor by the heart? Are they not expressions of human nature caught in its “natural meanness,' in its “cold” character? We can be sure of one thing: Lucrezia is not a cold woman: her love for Beuys confirms that. In the long run her cultural commitment, through Beuys, acquires the exceptional aspects of an almost spiritual approach, and | would go so far as to say that managing Beuys's heritage is the great spiritual adventure in Lucrezia's life: for this reason there are no boundaries between life and thought, mediated memory and direct action. After Beuys's death, we can say, Lucrezia began an incessant global investigation of herself, art, and the fundamental things of humanity. In the centre there is, obviously, the "Beuys phenomenon, that she has always considered as a phenomenon of 883

social relevance—not in sociological but in anthropological terms— and, most of all, as an unicum that it would be wrong to fragment in the aesthetic, ideological and spiritual aspects. This overwhelming determination to challenge the apportionment of human comprehension is the greatest contribution Lucrezia could give to the memory of Beuys, to consider it an existential whole. Actually, Beuys himself was an existential whole, a “motor” of artistic energy: in fact he signed everything he had within reach, and stated that a human being, the pure and simple human being, had in itself the possibility of being an artist. It was the purity of his humanity that gave him the opportunity of passing from life to art. And this passage from existence to creativity, that like an organic breath nourishes the “Beuys phenomenon," may be found in exactly the same way in Lucrezia's activity. Even her breath, in fact, is visual, aesthetic, sublimating everyday life, almost an alchemy. Here we may perceive most clearly the indelible mark of Beuys' ingenuity, which, like a regal seal, signs the matrix of our everyday life. We are living now in a truly mad world. A world where chaos is inflamed by religious fanaticism and gives birth to the monsters of terrorism, of operative ideology seen as homicide and cruelty. If | think of Beuys, | must admit that his definitive choice was that of a totally channelled tolerance. How useful this natural and spiritual dimension would be in our time: it certainly would act as the most effective “anti-anthrax." If Beuys were alive, he would have certainly tried a human dialogue with Muslims ... But, in all sincerity, | do not know if he would have been able to overcome the barrier of hatred and incomprehension presently wrapping the heart and thought of such an important part of humanity. | believe that his attempt would have consisted of an allusion to the problem, rather than of a direct indication of its real terms. However, | think | am right in saying that people who share Beuys's good will, and with his conceptual, spiritual and operative genius, are extremely rare today. On this human level we are really suffering an emptiness we perceive as such. And this is not casual, as there is no separation between Beuys's art and his planetary perspective, his spirit, entirely aimed at building a world capable of conquering the sense of peace. And it is also through his idea of art, therefore, that we can overcome some of these excruciating contradictions. But what is left us today? One thing at least, | think: the awareness that we will never be able to contrast the contradiction of the barrier of hatred without good will.

Beuys's memory must be of use for all of us, as an ideal reference to human behaviour, perhaps Utopian in present conditions, but that opens itself to hope like a heart. Humanity is not yet certain of destroying itself in this struggle of madness aimed at nothing else but global suicide. 884

Beuys hands down

to us an active, not a

passive, message, with an extremely clear warning for operative tolerance and, at this very moment, it would be indeed a duty for everybody to think of it a little more. All these considerations are virtually crystallized in the activity Lucrezia De Domizio undertakes since Beuys’ death, with the consolation of a “good will" expressed first of all by rendering active the memory of an extraordinary artist. And yet, nothing would have any sense if Lucrezia's profound reasons were not, actually, in the total rooting of her thought in Beuys' planetary humanist conception. In Bolognano, therefore, we not only have /ucrezia‘s house, but also the geographical place of our hopes. In today's world lucrezia‘ house must become a place of active hope, certainly not just a destination of pilgrimage for an improbable artistic sanctity ... on the contrary, it must be like an oasis of free and tolerant thought. A place where each of us may rediscover our true motivations inside ourselves. (From Lucrezia De Domizio Durinì, Bolognano.

La Spiritualità di Joseph Beuys, Silvana Editoriale,

Cinisello Balsamo 2002)

"‘JosEPH BEUYS DIFESA DELLA NATURA Promotore

Comune e cura

Ideazione

di Bolognano

Bar.ssa

Lucrezia

De Domizio

Durini

Foto Buby Durini

della nascita del Maestro tedesco il Comune di Bolognano ricorda il Concittadino Onorario Joseph Beuys.

_. In occasione dell'80° anniversario

Un artista che non ha inventato nessun metodo ma ha dedicato l'intera sua vita al miglioramento dei metodi esistenti nella società.

L'operazione DIFESA DELLA NATURA di JOSEPH BEUYS nasce in Abruzzo e specificatamente a Bolognano. È il più grande capolavoro della storia dell'Arte del XX secolo che l'uomo dal Cappello di Feltro lascia in eredità a tutti gli uomini della terra a Salvaguardia della Natura e in Difesa dei Valori Umani, della Collaborazione, della libera Creatività. Barssa

PADRINO Bolognano

©

dell'intera

12 Maggio

Manifestazione

Prof.

PIERRE

Lucrezia

De Domizio

Durini

RESTANY

2001/2002

®

885

Giorgio Gaslini

Beuys's Woods and... Lucrezia Joseph Beuys's works have always echoed in my thinking and in my perception as a musician. Works made up of voice and music that offer such an elevated formal and aesthetic wisdom brimming with a strong human message, l'd say a neo-humanistic one. Works and voices that are completely open, and that | believe correspond to my aesthetic of “total-music;' that is, the music of a musician who is completely open to the music and genres of music of every time and every place... much like Joseph Beuys's Total Art... the affinities of spiritual human sentiments that join man with nature... time with space... the pure sentiments of men from past times... men who—as Lucrezia would say—have left their mark on history. It was a true privilege for me to meet Lucrezia De Domizio Durini, a rare individual and profound connoisseur of Beuys's world; it was an encounter that reinforced and expanded my convictions concerning this great protagonist of a noble art so closely bound to life itself, to people, to nature. Numerous meetings of close collaboration took place with my friend Lucrezia. | remember March 19, 1997 and the festivities at the Milan Triennale. | played in tribute to my friend Buby Durini, who had passed away, and who had always loved my Jazz... and then there was

the inauguration of the 52nd Venice Biennale in 2007, the thirty-year anniversary of 100 Giorni della Conferenza Permanente (100 Days of Permanent Conference) at Documenta VI in Kassel in 1977... and the hypogeum of Joseph Beuys's “Plantation Paradise” in Bolognano... and more. That was how | decided to transfer to music all that my mind had keenly absorbed in the years of the German master and my personal passion for art. lt was Lucrezia Durini who commissioned me to write “// Bosco di Beuys" (Beuys's Woods) for a baritone, an all woman's choir and instruments, based on a fragment from the discussion Defence of Nature that took place on May 13, 1984 between Joseph Beuys and the young artist Marco Bagnoli. | was drawn to this text of extreme human, social and ecological interest. | wrote a work that was first played at the Casa della Musica in Parma as part of the Festival Parma Frontiere and can be listened to on the CD “Gaslini Sinfonico” with the Velut Luna label. | remember Lucrezia's masterly direction in the staging of the work. That same day, November 8, 2008, the book Giorgio Gaslini. Lo Sciamano del Jazz was officially presented and... my “watercolours” were also unveiled; Lucrezia loved them very much, calling them poetic sound spaces. The book is an exceptional publication in which, in a direct line and by way of my voice, Lucrezia analyzes a pathway of life and work. Here are some of the author's words on the back cover: An amazing journey. An attempt to make the “words” of a figure in the history of post-Second World War music—Giorgio Gaslini. Lo Sciamano del Jazz—into a guide and an “echo” of the sentiment of humanity for the reader, where the foundations of “Courage” and “Humility” reflect his whole life of “Total Music.” | wish to thank my close friend Lucrezia De Domizio Durini, a precious and most knowledgeable expert on the works and thinking of the German master Joseph Beuys. A woman with passion who has always with endless and tireless devotion worked in the area of culture for the betterment of society. | am happy that today there are still such illustrious people who work for the benefit of the whole of humanity. Borgotaro, September 2010

886

Umberto Petrin

Beuys Voice.

A Dream Come True

Il concerto-performance Beuys Voice nacque nel maggio 2004, dopo che ebbi l'opportunità di incontraThe concert-performance Beuys-Voice was born in May 2004, after | had the chance to meet the Baroness Lucrezia De Domizio Durini in Milan, | had always seen in Beuys's figure the perfect union between Art and Life, and for some time | had been trying to relate to his thinking through Music. Considering the capacity for abstraction that is typical of Sound, the fact that it is situated beyond the confines of the Word, | wanted to attempt a transubstantiation of Beuysian “material” that is, a projection of the Master's ideas (which is where the concept of the “Voice” as a guiding presence comes from) to then symbolically lean towards a renewed opening up to a Post-Beuys period, an era in which to follow the path he had indicated by using means of expression and languages that are better suited to each one of us. The references | started out from were thus "Defence of Nature; " Olivestone" and the suggestions in the film “Diary of Seychelles!" Thanks to Lucrezia De Domizio Durini's essential contribution, to her determination and permission to access Buby Durini‘s invaluble archive, a man to whom we are all extremely grateful, | was able to breathe life into this project, which débuted in Naples the following July. Beuys Voice was later performed in a number of other venues, such as Italy, Spain, Greece, France and Switzerland. Each time the event was reconstructed depending on the location and the occasion, by virtue of a continuous in-depth study of Beuys's thinking, so that it was founded on the unrepeatability of the action, which | suppose the German master would have approved of. To know that this composition will be presented at the Kunsthaus in Zurich where the regal work Olivestone is held and that my music can be listened to while reading Lucrezia De Domizio Durini's Beuys Voice tells me that nothing about this Man will be lost... Lastly, as far as | am concerned, | confess that it is a dream that comes true each time... and for this | will always be indebted to Lucrezia. October 25, 2010

This musical composition was created by Umberto Petrin in occasion of the exhibition dedicated to Joseph Beuys: Difesa della Natura, presented in Zurich Kunsthaus on the 13th May 2011. The event is organized by Tobia Bezzola, Kunsthaus Kurator and Lucrezia De Domizio Durini, expert of Beuys art.

The long term cooperation between Umberto Petrin and Lucrezia Durini, expressed in several musical performances over the years, is spreading worldwide Joseph Beuys work, grounded in

concepts of humanism and social philosophy UMBERTO PETRIN

Beuys Voice

Umberto Petrin piano, ompositions Susie Helena Georgiadis voice

#1 Beuys Voice (Umberto Petrin) ©

Words by Joseph Beuys, spoken in Bobgnano May 13, 1984 Recorded & mixed on December 29, 2010 at PM Studio, Pavia Ita Sound engineer: Paolo Malusardi Produced by Umberto Petrin for Barssa Lucrezia De Domizio Durini Cover photo by Buby Durini © Archivio storico De Domizio Durini AIl rights reserved Made in Italy by Phonoplast SRL

From Bolagnano to Kunsthaus Ziirich

sarta vt OR

ev

i

n VI

SENI

I

RR IDO

DIE

Pb

="gi e again afini

ulti

SODI

=

pa

;

sl

stem

adi

sr

nersggi i,

.

"

VE

Y

$

sa

so

ns di

SARONNO

E Oer

tO

1 ee

rali

castità

previous pages Survey exhibition on

Claudio Sarmiento

Joseph Beuys at the Guggenheim Museum, New York 1976 Auto FI.U. is part of the

Reflections

museum's permanent The passing of time has not made the clear outlines of my Memory fade, something that | have never stopped cultivating and reconstructing, but it has actually reinforced my already very solid awareness of the great privilege, shared, | believe, by all the residents of Bolognano: the privilege of having been able to meet the great Master Joseph Beuys thanks to Baroness Lucrezia De Domizio Durini. It was May 13, 1984 when in this small town in the province of Pescara Joseph Beuys held his famous discussion Defence of Nature and inaugurated his Paradise Plantation. On that occasion | suggested to the City Administration of which | was a member, which at that time was led by Mayor Dionisio Nota, to make the Master an Honorary Citizen of Bolognano. The suggestion was received with great enthusiasm, also by the Institutions, and what had magically already been consolidated was born: a deep and “natural” bond between our locations and Beuys. Then, in January 1986, Joseph Beuys left us, he left Bolognano and the world, but in the meantime Buby Durini, with his thousands upon thousands of photographs had given us so many indelible memories, providing us with a precious and neverending spring capable of watering the plant of Memory, capturingTime on film and making the memories available to us, elevated to the dimensional rank of Eternity on paper. And in 1999, when Buby too had passed away, and fifteen years to the day from the first encounter with the German artist, Piazza Joseph Beuys was established in the historic neighbourhood of Bolognano, a space that unsurprisingly rose up on a place that at one time had been marked by urban decay and had been abandoned, both environmentally and by the city, and was now restored as a place for an ideal testimony overlooking the Valle dell'Orta. QAII this is held and projected well beyond space and time, thanks to the outstanding Energy of the amazing Lucrezia De Domizio Durini; an Energy that has undoubtedly—I’Il say it quietly so as not to interrupt the prodigious flowv—always been replenished and nourished by Beuys and by Buby. | thank them for this as well. Pescara, October 27, 2010

ì % diÈÈ $} HA

collection

Harald Szeemann and the Mayor Claudio Sarmiento during the inauguration of Piazza Beuys at Bolognano, May 13, 1999

Fernando Zari

From Abruzzo to Switzerland

At first with Buby, then together with Lucrezia, the deep ties of friendship and affection created from my childhood onwards gradually developed a close conceptual relationship substantiated by the works and thinking of the great German Master Joseph Beuys Beuys's “encounter” with Lucrezia and Buby was crucial: it was natural for Beuys to feel completely at home in the Abbruzzi, where he left an important mark.

It is from this Italian region that a huge rainbow begins and ends in Switzerland. It is an imaginary arc that starts from the Piazza in Bolognano named for Beuys and... recalls many testimonies. | see this rainbow

above

me

close to Lugano,

in Gentilino,

where

an "Oak"

commemorates

Beuys on

the twentieth anniversary of his famous Defence of Nature, a “Defence” and a “Safeguarding” that Lucrezia has memorably spread around the world... And now this multicoloured arc ends in Zurich thanks to Lucrezia's desire and generosity, where the charismatic figure of the shamanic artist Joseph Beuys will keep people talking about him for a very long... Gentilino, October 2010

THe

Riyal VERRI

Fa BEFORE

Patricia and Fernando Zari at F.A.C., Paris, 1984

OLIVE.

RE '

—

Bolognano Piazza Beuys

I

a

| [SALVAGUARDIA

|

DELLA NATURA

gd

‘rp forestale

Italian stamps, Sa/vaguardia della Natura, March 1984, with Joseph Beuys's signature

ing a

3 LISI dEi %

°

#

("cor

gt

SFAENSMA RIN CARTOR

Repubblica di San Marino stamp, issued as a homage to Beuys on May 13, 2004 on the occasion of the “Difesa della Natura” exhibition at the Museo d'Arte Moderna

2001

Joseph Beuys, documents from 1972 to 1985

J. BEUYS

‘3 Ottobre )

16

ssaa,

sg! Ù

TELI

RA di

dr

Tha b

v

Ero, (==) fe

AI

[E]

=

i ni

stitÈ

NI

md

[SEL

fit Lista

| t@maglii SUE sl| (MS

di

B Hbti

GALLERIA LUCREZIA DE DOMIZIO , Via delle Caserme 44 | Pescara P.N.

Di

MER

| ina

ME

iii.

{ | 1% Tanaxito -tu, noor

da sli sii

|E

‘ore 18,00

ii

CTRIRTHEI PEN (dia PA

ÎiHi {i }pii ji

;

o

si i

È

\B 3

DIFESA DELA MRSÀ |

AU F.L.U

s

RN

di

OGGI

Ò

7

CE

/| ra

99

A

= i,

3

"a

Bd =

Ra

a

="

"i

== ERI

—+

897

Dic A

OLIVESTONE é

|rtml oCa

277,

fincontro con Beuys

Joseph Beuys

DIFESA della NATURA con

J. BEUYS

SA

z FEE Ca

“end segno7

ANZ.ANATUF

SEUM BEUYS

/

È

-

pe

Vizi

3

x

7 200 | Di

il

I Ò" LiU.

BAL MZERTIFIRAT

JOSEPH BEUYS 7000 EICHEN IN KASSEL

sr

hu

o

me

1 BAUM Bi de Nt Jp ig Pa fre a a podi

chi dice che

"il coniglio non ama . . Joseph Beuys ? j

i

Fax

CI

pit

[RT 17

È

AL

14

}

DI

Do PAZZIA

+

|

>

LA

i

li 4

Prof. Dott. GIUSEPPE

E a

}

5

a

CONSOLI

Docenta'di Patologia Speclalo Medica

@ di Ematologia Clinica noll'Università.dì Napoli Professore Stabilizzato di Reumatologia nell'Università di Chieti Primario Medico Ospedale Civile 85100. PESCARA Vinlo Regina Margherita,

59 - To],

278291

{Consultazioni ore 18-17 è per appuntamento)

Talefono:473114-23203

899

Sixth Station

Beuys from Bolognano to Zurich

A Virtual Conversation Tobia Bezzola and Lucrezia De Domizio Durini

Tobia Bezzola: Twenty-five years after his death, Beuys still lives as an artist but no so much as a social reformer. Would you agree?

Tobia Bezzola and Christian Klemm visiting the Paradise Plantation and Palazzo Durini, Bolognano May 26, 2010

Lucrezia De Domizio Durini: Nowadays we live in a world of global interconnections; a world in which biological, psychological, social, economic and environmental phenomena are all interdependent. One feels the need for a new “paradigm,’ for a new vision of reality, a fundamental change in our perception of real values. To offer even an approximate description of this world, we need to adopt an “ecological” point of view—a view which mechanistic Cartesian-Newtonian science can no longer offer us. However, as a man—but principally as an artist—Joseph Beuys did chart a passage from material growth to an inner growth predicated upon human potential. Beuyss new vision of reality is an “ecological” one, but in a sense that goes beyond immediate concerns with the protection of the environment. In order to highlight, in Beuysian terms, the deep meaning of ecology, one has to distinguish between superficial environmentalism and depth ecology. Vvhilst superficial environmentalism is concerned with how the natural environment might be more efficiently controlled and managed for the benefit of humankind, depth ecology recognizes that if ecological equilibrium is to exist there must be profound changes in the way we see our role as human beings in the eco-system of the planet—and that change requires a new philosophical and spiritual basis. Beuys's concept of depth ecology goes well beyond the scientific framework. lt strives towards an intuitive awareness of the unity of all forms of life; of the interdependence of life's numerous manifestations; of the cycles of change and transformation to which life is subject. VVhen the concept of the human spirit is understood in this sense—that is, as awareness of each individual's connection to the cosmos as a whole—it becomes clear that Beuys's ecological awareness is a truly spiritual awareness. In effect, the idea that the individual is linked to the cosmos lies at the very root of the word “religion’—from the Latin verb religare (“to bind," “to fasten")—and at the root of the Sanskrit term “Yoga, which means “union” Me know that the philosophical and spiritual framework for the wisdom implicit in the idea of depth ecology does not entirely originate with Beuys. lt can be seen at various points in human history: in the Taoists and Heraclitus, in such Western philosophers as Spinoza and Heidegger, in the works of various American poets and writers (from Walt Whitman to Gary Snyder). It is a concept that can be found in such masterpieces of world literature as Dante's Divina 903

Commedia—masterpieces whose structure is inspired by the same ecological principles one sees in Nature. So Beuys does not set forward depth ecology as an entirely new philosophy. Instead, he limits himself, throughout his entire life as an artist, to trying to reawaken awareness of what is part of our cultural heritage. The greatness of Beuys's ecology justifies the claim that Beuys as an artist was profoundly and authentically “ecological.’

In this context one must take a broad view of the German masters work. Artist-shaman and visionary, Joseph Beuys actively anticipated social problems and issues; he foresaw a society in spiritual, cultural and intellectual decline. He dedicated his entire life to using all the means at his disposal—including the mythology attached to his own persona—in an attempt to re-establish an equilibrium, a connection between spiritual life and the materialist consumerism that was already engulfing man and society as a whole. From his first drawings (of men, animals and plants), which | have always seen as the expression of a complete human project; from his lessons as a teacher at the Dusseldorf Academy; from his performances and public discussions; from his creation of various institutions (for example, the F1.U., Free International University); from his various plantations to his last great masterpiece, the Italian Defence of Nature operation—the artist's entire career embodied a unified intent. It was focused always and in every way upon the improvement of society. Furthermore, one should not forget that in his last public discussion with artist Marco Bagnoli on May 13, 1984 at Bolognano, Beuys remained optimistic, in spite of his full awareness of the profound spiritual crisis afflicting the whole of society. Maintaining optimism and hope, he championed that cosmic love implicit within the human psyche—what Freud calls “sympathetic understanding. It is this which enables us to understand that the key factor in our lives is the energy possessed by all humankind, an energy which can produce benefits for ourselves and for society as a whole. This is the greatness of Joseph Beuys's regal art. Often—very often—when people talk of Beuys, they forget that he was primarily a sculptor, a Sculptor of Forms and a Sculptor of Souls—"a unique phenomenon in the history of world art” If we consider Beuys and Duchamp, two artists who lived during the same period of history, vve might say that we are now living in a "Duchampian” age, in which objects, materialism, have become a virus that invades all aspects of our life. Even the excessive growth and development of technology have contributed to the emergence of an obsessive economic system. Life has become unhealthy, in both physical and psychological terms. Beuys always worked on Time rather than Space: he was a spiritual social reformer, vvho reminds humankind to be truly human. He addresses himself to people who are caught up in the fever of “having” and have thus lost their memory, have forgotten respect for the fundamental principles of Mother Nature. 904

Art is like Nature; it requires long stretches of time to bear fruit. The seed planted in the earth requires a skilled and attentive farmer to watch over it in good weather and bad, to nurture with constancy and passion the plant that grows and will later put forth fruit. Beuys is the constant gardener of the History of World Art.

T.B.: One of the central ideas in Beuys's art is the overcoming of the divide between East and West. What do you think he would have said to the Germans of East Berlin and to the people of the other former communist countries, where after 1989 the main ambition seems to have been to have more money, to pursue the same sort of consumerism as existed in the West? L.D.D.: An interesting question and one to which | will give a personal answer, which is obviously open to discussion. As someone active in the field of culture, | had the great good fortune to become very close to Beuys and to share his philosophy entirely. | should also point out that it has never been my intention to classify Beuys as some sort of new “messiah.' In the History of World Art, Beuys will remain one of the greatest artists of all time. Beuys's untimely death came on January 23, 1986, some time before the fall of the Berlin Wall on November 9, 1989. Thus he was not able to witness the consequences which fell so short of the utopian realism that for him had been a concrete utopia (and in the latter years of his life became the Utopia of the Earth). It is this dream which allows us to continue referring to Beuys as not only a great artist but also as a “social reformer"—or, better, “a social-spiritual reformer:' The division of the world between Capitalism and Communism, and the existence of a Wall which separated East Berlin, capital of the German Democratic Republic, from West Berlin, an enclave of the Ger man Federal Republic (that is, a piece of territory entirely isolated from the State to which it belonged) was always a cause of great suffering for Beuys. The famous “red book"—the Dritter Weg document, subtitled /dea and Practical Attempt at Producing an Alternative to Existing Social Systems in the West and Fast—is a lucid summary of the research that had for years been carried out by the Free International University, which Beuys had created to focus on the socio-economic problems that still, almost thirty-five years later, affect all humankind. These were the problems which Beuys himself publicly discussed and explored at the 1977 Documenta VI in Kassel, during the historic Permanent Conference which lasted 100 days (an event that | myself witnessed first-hand). This research convinced Beuys that without a Revolution it would be impossible to construct a new society that went beyond the structures imposed by the dominance of “Real Capitalism” and “Real Communism. lt should be remembered that in July 1987 just before Beuys's death, the European Union Act came into force, a fundamental step towards 905

the unification that would only be completed after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Now the situation has changed again: following the advent of the Internet and the subsequent internationalization of markets, countries such as China, India and Brazil are conquering the globalized world with their own products, causing recurrent crises for both the dollar

and the euro, affecting both the USA and the 27-member European Union. When one considers this new situation in the world—the power of great new financial consortia and their pathological effect upon the world economy; religious fundamentalism; unemployment; the gap between rich and poor nations; ecological problems and their serious climatic effects, resulting in famine in large areas of the world; the many ways in which humankind is exploited, humiliated and tortured—then one sees that Beuys's hope was to create a “new society,’ an Alternative to both Capitalism and the State bureaucracies of Communism. In his utopian-realistic dream, the artist Beuys looked towards a great alliamce, a collaboration between humankind to eliminate the numerous social and racial differences which exist; our continual anguish with regard to tomorrow. His goal was an existence lived in total freedom and equality of rights, irrespective of institutions or party ideologies. Initially, Beuys had looked to politics as offering chance of social renewal. But ultimately he had to acknowledge that culture alone could unite peoples and races. lt was precisely this way of envisaging Art and Life which results in the exceptional nature of Beuys the Sculptor of Souls, whose actions taught and whose voice sculpted. I am convinced that Beuys—a man of action who had very clear ideas with regard to Direkte Democraktie—would today again have “got himself involved”; would have been followed by that multitude of people who believe in human rights and have the courage to put themselves at risk for the common good, in full respect of humankind and Nature. Beuys would certainly have worked for a Real Capitalism that was capable of redistributing available resources in order to eliminate—or, at least, reduce—the glaring inequalities to be seen throughout our planet. With his creative energy and his innate charisma, he would have struggled for the elimination of the ideological superstructures and barriers that humiliate so many people; for innovative modes of living; for new social and artistic creations. I am convinced that Beuys would have addressed himself to ordinary people, to those in crisis—just as he would have denounced: parasitism; the numerous compromises between the world of politics and the world of organized crime; financial speculation; and, above all, the ruthlessness of the human exploiters of humanity. Undoubtedly, Beuys would have travelled around the world in a concrete attempt to find a peaceful solution to the numerous existential problems of our age. This would not have been a new approach, but a continuation of the road Beuys had always taken: putting himself, 906

as both man and artist, “out there/ taking risks.

But he certainly would not have created a “political party” as such. Instead, he would have founded a new Institution, which would have been open to one and all—similar to those which he had created in the past, their structure adapted to each new situation. If we are aware of the grave crisis we are experiencing, we can better understand how Beuys voice is still addressed, without limits of time or space, to all of humanity. Besides, isn't it the voice that itself transmits? T.B.: There are many people who think that artists’ social utopias— like Beuys's Soziale Plastik—are interesting poetical metaphors. But that ifthose same artists try to implement them within the real world they can become dangerous, as some sort of indirect justification of a type of totalitarianism. Do you think that Beuys was aware of this potential risk in his projects? L.D.D.: To give you an answer that best expresses what | think here, | should start by saying that there are people who do not believe in the benefits of Art; that numerous “politicized” critics exist as parasites upon Art, enclosing it within stifling methodologies. There are also people who are as sly as they are cultured; veritable masters in creating situations that enable them to exploit young artists. And finally there are the “militant” journalists, who exercise their baneful power in the media solely for purposes of economic gain and personal prestige. All of these work to destroy true creativity. They create confusion and doubt within the “System of Art"—in particular, amongst those who cannot distinguish between true art and the numerous fakes that exercise such power. And all this is happening at a moment of both confusion and “dumbing down.

Hence, the suffering reflected in the work of the real artist—a suffering which ultimately takes on the character of a shared collective wound. However, the true artist does not see suffering as simply negative. He strives in every way to seize the spiritual and positive side to such affliction, transforming it into something therapeutic; something that serves to reawaken and extend his own creative faculties. Suffering thus becomes a sort of necessary step towards transcendental growth, towards a wider and more creative awareness. Those who consider such artistic social utopias as Joseph Beuys's Soziale Plastik to be interesting solely as poetic metaphors; who argue that over time, however, they may become dangerous because, as you point out, they can lead to some form of totalitarianism—they are people who, | am certain, have nothing to do with Art. Art-Art with a capital A—has its roots in Democratic freedoms, in the absolute necessity of spiritual growth. True Art is something of which only a free man is worthy; its sole aim is to penetrate the spirit, to improve such a man's life. Because Art is as ancient as humanity itself; it is independent of all sciences. 907

It has a transcendental ability that rests on two main pilasters: Creativity and Utopia.

Creative energy is inborn within human nature; it is something which all of us—or most of us—can draw upon from birth. Unfortunately, it is often then lost, stifled or swallowed up by individual cireumstances. However, this does not happen to the true artist. His destiny is that of people who have an innate ability to produce ideas which break with traditional schema. He will overcome all stereotypes, breaking all the rules imposed by sterile conformity. The true artist has a deep understanding of the needs of society; and he uses the instruments in his possession to open the way to a different vision of the world, a vision that will benefit the whole of society.

\VVhat would man—and, even more so, Man-the-Artist—be without utopias, without desires and dreams? The problem arises from the meaning that is given to the world “utopia”; from the position each of us gives such utopias within our own existence. If we look at the utopia described in Plato's Republic, in Bacon's New Atlantis, in Campanella's Città del Sole, in Wieland's Der Goldene Spiegel, in the work of figures such as Rimbaud, Bakunin and many others... right up to the famous Museum of Obsession created by my friend Harald Szeemann... one sees that in each and every case these are projects for the reform of society. One should not forget that every great political, economic and religious reform within society has always involved a utopian phase. The utopias proposed always reflect the social conditions pertaining at a given historic period. Unfortunately, the powers-that-be have always worked to impede their transformation into operative schemes. Here it is IMportant to quote what Beuys himself said with regard to the concept of utopia in reply to a comment made by an artist during the discussion of the Defence of Nature at Bolognano on May 13,

1984. La Penna: | think that your message is rather utopian, if one considers that it is addressed to the same adult society that destroved Nature...

Joseph Beuys: First of all, it has been said that all these ideas are utopian, and this leads one to discuss the meaning that is given to the word “utopian.” This term is used in different ways, and we must here talk of at least two of the meanings that it can have. For some people, it describes a totally irrational vision of the world: this use gives a certain poetic or artistic quality to the word “utopian” but implies that there is no possibility of applying such visions to the reality of life. The persons who use “utopian” in this sense implicitly claim that it would be better to search out some other type of message if one wants to bring about a real and much-desired change in society. Thus they talk of “utopia” as something negative. However, there are other people who use this word in another way. They feel the need to 908

talk about “concrete utopia,” in order to make it clear that what they are interested in is a long-term project for a possible realitvr—that is, a real futurological plan for the true liberation of humanity... I would also like to cite a small episode that often comes to mind vvhen | look back over the very special incidents in which Beuys and myself were involved. On January 5, 1981 the Beuys family were leaving the Seychelles to fly back to Dusseldorf. We were visiting the typical local market at Mahè. Beuys wandered delighted and fascinated between the stalls laden with spices and tropical fruit, whilst Eva and the two children, Wenzel and Jessyka, were admiring the brightly-coloured fabrics. My husband Buby was photographing Beuys, who had put his “hat” back on and was carrying a typical local cooking-pot around like a sort of bag. When he had first seen that pot in my house at Praslin he fell in love with it IMmediately, attributing deep meaning to it and including it in the works of Diary of Seychelles; in fact, it was the one souvenir he took back to Dusseldorf. As we continued wandering through the crowded market of Mahè, we heard delighted voices shouting “Beuys! Beuys!" lt was a group of young Germans who had recognized him; they came up to him with beaming smiles, celebrating him like some sort of “star” Beuys turned to me, looked at me in the eyes, scarcely raised the “pot/’ and said: Lucrezia, this is my future... Buby continued taking photographs. There is nothing beautiful, pleasant or great in life that is not more or less mysterious. There can be no equivocation about Beuys's project as an artist, even I# each of us can read it as he or she wants. His voice, reminding humanity to be human, will remain alive forever. T.B.: Twenty-five years on from Beuys's death, art history now tends to explain and contextualize his work, with reference to various 20thcentury art movements:

Dadaism

(Schwitters), Fluxus, Minimalism,

Arte Povera. Are these superficial references, or is there a more profound relationship with at least one of these movements? L.D.D.: More than any other artist, Beuys is someone who, in his life and in his work, represents the anti-traditional energy generated by contemporary art over the last few decades. An atypical person when considered in relation to broad artistic trends, efforts have been made to links him with various movements:

from Dadaism to Fluxus, from Minimalism to Arte Povera, from Per formance Art to Conceptualism. However, Beuys has always managed to invest his own Persona with Art and Art with his very own Persona. This means much more than is expressed by that old "ever green” which asserts the identity of Art and Life. By placing himself within the work of art, Beuys was striving to highlight the anthropological character of all art. The work of his entire life responds to his need to speak, to commu909

nicate, to express himself using whatever means available. For Beuys, being an artist meant leading a life with other people. It meant striving for a relationship of fraternal collaboration, for that “elemental and profound understanding for all that happens on the earth” (because what happens in our world also happens within us). There are two aspects here that are very particular to Beuys. One is his interest in re-appropriation rather than in conquest, in discovery rather than invention, in therapeutic improvement rather than substitution. The second is the famous “free creativity” which Beuys preached and taught throughout the world. In other words, the need to widen and extend human energies in order to acquire knowledge of a truth that is already within our souls and within Nature. It is true that Beuys had an established relation with Fluxus, but only for three years (from 1962 to 1965). An international Movement founded by George Maciunas, Fluxus brought together all forms of artistic praxis—visual arts, music, poetry, theater, dance, performance—focusing upon the central role of the artist's own body as the subject of art. It attracted a range of different characters—including Nam June Paik, Charlotte Moorman, Wolf Vostell, Daniel Spoerri, John Cage, Robert Filliou and Bazon Brock—vwhich in itself confirms the open character of the movement. For Beuys, participation in Fluxus was important because it gave him the opportunity to propose his own ideas to a wider public; furthermore, it enabled him to establish close links with people whose avowed aim was interdisciplinary communication. But if, on the one hand, Beuys shared the conviction that art should not be limited to artists, on the other, he felt that this aim was not being pursued in an articulate manner. For social actions to be effective and efficacious, solid theoretical and political bases were required. Furthermore, he had always been contrary to the Dadaist streak of “provocation for provocation's sake” that was part of Fluxus. For Beuys, provocation should be a motive force of energy which could open up new directions; could break out of the rut into which ideas had settled; could turn indifference into interest. However, Beuys was particularly attracted by Fluxus's use of music—but not in the conventional sense. And he envisaged sculpture as made not only with such solid materials as metal, clay and stone, but also with sounds, noises, melodies and other components—all of which could serve to expand the very concept of sculpture. Having attained full autonomy in both his conceptual ideas and means of expression, Beuys left Fluxus to begin that period of aktionen which would establish his international reputation, making him immediately into a very controversial figures (primarily because his work was simply not understood). It should also be pointed out that Joseph Beuys never established “a method." On the contrary, throughout his whole life he would with extreme generosity work to improve the methods that already existed within society, calling upon all of us to respect those principles that underlie the relations between Humankind and Nature. This is 9710

the message that Beuys communicates in his work and life. In recent years, newspapers and magazines have concentrated on Joseph Beuys almost exclusively in terms of the prices fetched for works made using everyday objects—prices imposed by the auction houses of London and New York. Yet the truth is that many people continue to ask: VVho was Joseph Beuys? An extravagant artist in a felt hat? A poet-lover of Nature? A philosopher preacher? Beuys was, first and foremost, a man who loved humanity and Nature.

The crisis of modern humanity—the loss of identity caused by the devastating effects of consumerism—was Beuys's main concern throughout his life as man and artist. In effect, he searched out a means of access to the truth—not in the arbitrary inventions of the system within which we live but within reality. For this is a truth which humankind has only to discover, within itself and within Nature. Forming one reconciled soul, Humankind and Nature will construct a new world. Thus Beuys's ideas focus upon Humankind and its creative energy. In this sense, the German Master delved into politics, economics, agriculture, ecology, humanitarian problems—all the problems which affliet humankind every day. | have always looked upon Beuys as a diamond: a diamond has many facets, the transparency of each rendering the others visible, in all their compactness and unity. So, to understand Beuys's work, to be able to judge it, one must consider it not only in formal terms, but also as a whole. One must analyze the complexity of its articulation, of its focus on social issues and their implications. It is in this way that one can truly understand the motive force behind Beuys's actions, the goals for which his art strove.

More than any other, Beuys is an artist who knew how to—vwho strove to—embody the human figure, the overcoming of art as such. The domain upon which he focused his efforts was the utopian domain of natural energy and spiritual communication: reality as the phenomenological spectre of human possibilities. This Will enabled Beuys to focus his work upon the thousands of directions that life offers to the individual; it also—and above all—enabled him to anticipate the social needs being felt by our present age. This is why he cannot be pigeonholed within any historically-categorized artistic movement. As a leading figure in world art, he is still someone to be discovered, to be investigated and explored in depth. T.B.: Do you think that there is the risk that many people may consider the work Defence of Nature with a certain superficiality, given that in Bolognano Beuys was primarily interested in organic farming? How would you explain that Defence of Nature is above all anthropological inmeaning—a defence against the spiritual alienation of humankind? 911

L.D.D.: To answer these questions, one has to clarify a few historical premises, which widen one's view of the Beuysian vision of Nature. To understand Beuys's relation with Nature one has first to understand its deep roots in the Romantic thought that placed Man at the very centre of relations with Nature. Goethe, Schelling, Novalis and Steiner are the great figures who could be said to have founded this relation. Starting from his deep studies in this area and his profound knowledge of the human condition, Beuys shifted the focus of this vision towards

the future. Thus, whilst drawing upon the Romantic concepts, he took a decidedly more realistic attitude; in effect, he looked towards the future and saw within it the possibility that man might regain anthropological unity with himself and with Nature. Furthermore, we know that on several occasions Beuys himself cited Steiner as a model—just as there are numerous analogies between his own ideas and Romantic thought (analogies which invite us to reflect upon comparisons between the two). There are two significant moments in Beuys's life which explain his thought as a sort of therapeutic development for the improvement of humankind. | would say that these two moments enclose the circle of a life. We always act in the direction of destiny. The two things are one sole thing. The first moment dates back to the years 1956-57 spent at Kranemburg in Germany, at the farm of the brothers Hans and Franz Joseph van der Grinten, his first collectors. Beuys had taken refuge there when deep in clinical depression; then, thanks to the contact with nature and to work in the fields, he managed to overcome all his physical and psychological problems. He achieved the sort of balance and equilibrium which enabled him to trace out the lines of a new theory of art. An art that would involve the social body as a whole, this was predicated upon the central anthropological idea of human creativity, of Sculpture as Plastik Soziale, the most revolutionary concept of development and evolution to be found in the history of art. The second period began in 1973 in Bolognano, a small town in Abruzzo of only 300 inhabitants. Here, on the agricultural estate of my husband Baron Giuseppe Durini and with my own direct collaboration, Beuys would from 1973 to the year of his death work on an entire body of projects, ideas and collaborations—all a concrete expression of his striving to move beyond romantic nostalgia for a distant past, to provide the history of world art with a great masterpiece: the Defence of Nature. This was Art become an everyday activity, a creative commitment to life. Beuys's Concrete Utopia became the Utopia of the Earth, the source of a new Art. I have always thought that we must sow seeds. It does not matter it they all put forth shoots. For us, it is enough that one should do so, for that will bear new fruit and produce new seeds. 9712

Beuys's periods in Bolognano were like so many periods of sowing. And the fruits of that sowing belong to those people who, like careful farmers, had the courage and love to watch over the plant in good and bad weather. This slow and courageous work is that of all free men. Art like Nature requires long stretches of time. Beuys' Defence of Nature. will remain forever as a unique phenomenon in world art. A colossal operation that occupied the last fifteen years of his life, it drew upon the rich history of his own work and spiritual explorations, my own constant collaboration and the magical photographic talent of Buby Durini. And all within a context in which no llmits were set to the exploration and investigation of human thought and creative energy. The relation with Nature had always been present in Beuys's art. It was, in effect, a theme that can be traced from his first years as an artist (the archetypal drawings of men, animals and plants) right through to the Defence of Man and the Safeguard of Nature that date from the last years of his life. His concept of Concrete Utopia found real expression in the trio of plantations: in the Seychelles, at Bolognano and the Utopia of the Earth at Kassel. Joseph Beuys Defence of Nature is not to be understood solely from an ecological point of view. It is also anthropological: the defence of humankind, of human values and of creativity. All of these are themes of ever more pressing contemporary relevance. Since Beuys's death, a lot has been written about the man's life and work in numerous different languages and countries. But little— perhaps deliberately littte—has been said about the important signals which the last fifteen years of his life generated in Italv—to be specific, in Abruzzo. Signals which then made themselves felt in many countries of the world. From Goethe through Nietzsche to Beuys himself, Italy has been the favoured destination for the Romantic Northern soul. However, Beuys radically changed the contemplative associations of this topos of Ger man culture; Italy was not to be mused upon, it was a nurturing humus. From 1972 to his death, Beuys visited Italy more than any other country. This was a precise cultural choice, for here the very availability of both the human and natural elements of life exercized a powerful influence upon Beuys as man and artist. Above all in Abruzzo, Beuys found fertile ground for a creed based on love and fraternal collaboration between free and creative individuals. In reply to your first question, | clarified the substantial difference between ecology that does not go beyond immediate concerns with environmental protection and the depth ecology that one has to refer to when considering Beuys. Another concept of importance is that of “Unity in diversity This basically refers to the cooperation that is fundamental for all those who are seriously intending to carry out real action—and it was one of the main motives behind Beuys's interest in the Green Movement in Germany in the 1970s and 1980s. In that movement, he saw a possibility for the real expression of thoughts 913

and ideas unbound by any ideology. Unfortunately, things went rather differentlv: the movement became the Green Party and—just like any political party—vwas, in Beuys's opinion, a failure. In the last years of his life, Beuys saw politics as increasingly difficult—indeed, pointless. He held that, nurtured within the obsolete womb of politics, no plan or project would bear good fruit. This was also true of the Greens, who were then attracting people who had previously been linked with other parties (particularly on the Left) and who now, under the banner of Ecology, continued unperturbed to pursue their usual political demagoguery. Thus one can understand why for Beuys Ecology did not mean environmentalism. The terms Beuys used to express his concepts always have a transcendental meaning. For example, such terms as “circulation; “flow” “organs” give his theory a connotation of physical reality. “Circulation” refers to the blood which flows uniformly within us—just as money flows within the channels for the manufacturing and distribution of goods. However, it must not accumulate anywhere in a nonorganic manner, for then it would threaten the survival of other organs. Just as he had throughout his life, in his Defence of Nature Beuys used terms that refer to universal concepts. In the famous discussion that had taken place in the Exchange Building (Pescara) during the 1978 presentation of the project Foundation for the Rebirth of Agriculture, Beuys spoke of Economics as the Utopia of the Earth, understood both as a concrete realization and a long-term

pi

SHE)

ANOVI

Argla !

914

d7%, (I

NI

tai

bi

plan. On that occasion he also gave the first Italian presentation of the FI.U. and of the “red book” Die Dritter Weg (which | then published in Italian with the title La Terza Via). The very location chosen for this discussion was significant. The Ex change Building was where the farmers of Abruzzo met each Monday for the sale and purchase of goods; it represented economic-cultural exchange, cooperative involvement, a broad concept of human arts and skills placed at the service of all. Agriculture is the art of cultivating fields in order to make them fertile. Seen in agricultural-social terms, this process depends on two main factors: the action of the soil and its natural components, and the action of man, who invests his labour as capital. Thus for Beuys true agri culture originates when man employs his own courageous and attenti ve labour in planting seedlings that will in time bear fruit. The trio of Beuys's plantations—Seychelles, Bolognano and Kasset form a global project, embodying a new way of understanding art as praxis. Beuys argued that the tree is one of the world's most widespread and richly-significant symbols; a mere bibliography of the tree would itself make up an entire encyclopaedia. M. Eliade distinguished seven main interpretations of the tree, which all develop around the central idea of the living cosmos undergoing constant regeneration. The tree is also the symbol of continually evolving life, stretching up towards heaven; like Leonardo da Vinci's tree, it is a powerful embodiment of the vertical. And it establishes contact between the three levels of the cosmos: the underground level, where its roots penetrate into the depths of the earth; the surface level, where the tree unfolds its trunk and branches; and the level of sky and the heavens, where the tree's bran-

ches reach up to the light of the sun. Thus the tree is the Axis of the World, and in this sense it has a central character. For Beuys, the tree

Plan for the construction of a research and documentation centre in the Bolognano Piantagione Paradise signed by Joseph Beuys on April 12, 1984

symbolizes Man, whose feet may be planted on the ground but whose thoughts can—should—be turned towards the transcendental. In his three plantations Beuys gives expression to a concept of total social transformation. The first was created on December 24, 1980 on the Seychelles. Invited for Christmas to our house “Coquille Blanche" at Praslin, Beuys planted two different palm trees: Coco de Mer and Coconut (Pure Nature equals Thought). The second plantation (1982-84) began in Bolognano on the Durini estate with the Paradise Plantation, where Beuys had his Studio. On May 13, 1984 at Bolognano—on occasion of the discussion of Defence of Nature—Beuys planted the First Italian Oak (Nature and Humankind equal Desire). The third plantation was started at Documenta VII in Kassel, with the 7000 Eichen project (1982-1986) (Nature and Reality equal WVill). The fact that Beuys identifies the tree with Man does not make this the expression of a merely ecological principle. He is expressing the transformation of life, a profoundly different ecological view of things. Nothing is more sublime than this comparison of the spiritual and temporal destiny of humankind to that of the tree. And in this sense one can see that in the planting that he and we were involved in, Beuys was addressing all free men, holding up the tree as a symbol of the growth and maturity of society. 915

T.B.: Your own personal links with Beuys—the deep friendship and relationship between him, yourself and Buby Durini—are at the orìgin of a vast range of cultural activity in which one can still feel the charisma and energy of the artist. Do you think that the young of today can undergo that same sort of transfert of energy, even without the possibility of a direct relationship and engagement with the artist himself? L.D.D.: In spite of the personal tragedy that | have known, | consider myself to have been fortunate. | was able to draw nourishment from the energy and spirit of Joseph Beuys and | was present at unrepeatable historical events. Beuys bequeathed to me a spiritual heritage beyond measure, which changed my vision of life and art. From Beuys | learnt to love, respect and understand humankind, to have a wider vision of Art. | learnt to be

free, to be courageous. After Beuys's death, | felt a powerful ethical duty to pass on his teachings. And this is why for me the Defence of Nature operation became a vital mission to extend understanding and knowledge of Beuys's ideas through all means possible: lectures, books, conferences, publications, debates, university theses, donations, plantations. | also created the magazine Risk arte oggi, a periodical of cultural intercommunication that is basically inspired by Beuysian ideas. One does not conserve together with others.

a memory; one rebuilds it. And it is rebuilt

Beuys saw Bolognano as “the town of Culture in Nature, and true to that idea | have transformed the small Abruzzo town into a place of Art, creating Piazza Beuys, the Vetrine notturne, the Homage to Beuys monument (a back-lit image) and the large Defence of Nature sign at the entrance to the town. And, last but not least, in the Luogo della Natura. Servizi e Magazzini della Piantagione Paradiso | achieved Beuys's dream, creating a hypogeum that is a venue of meetings and discussions, where artists and intellectuals from various disciplines can exchange ideas. The very name, with its reference to “service facilities!" indicates how culture is at the service of society; how knowledge accumulated over years of experience and investigation is focused upon the improvement of art and society. A Beuys drawing (dated April 12, 1984) heralds the form that the final architectural design of the hypogeum would take. I also devised the “Free International Forum”—a two-yearly event—to bring together figures from various disciplines for the discussion of different aspects of the socio-cultural problems facing our age.

| myself always find it satisfying to be invited to conferences and stages in academies and universities. In a confused society without fixed points of reference, | feel that young people love Beuys; that they read

and study my publications . want to know more; they feel the need They to link their own life with a better future. For them, Beuys's ideas are 916

like a sheet anchor. Since Beuys's death | have been involved in the supervision of eighty-seven degree theses. When the young students come to Bolognano, | put them up in one of the “houses” that various artists have converted into sites of art themselves. They can wander around the Paradise Plantation and are always very interested. | always make myself available for all their research needs, without any thought of economic gain. Young people represent the future of art and society, just as our education system is the body that is fundamental to a civilized nation. | try to communicate to them all the energy | derived from Beuys's teachings. One day Harald Szeemann said to me: “Lucrezia, Beuys's Defence of Nature is the work that you yourself are doing Post-Beuys." My optimistic view of things leads me to think that nothing of Beuys will be lost in spite of the passing of time. T.B.: Since Beuys's death of his thought via books, Beuys's project continues Could you say something

you have continued to extend knowledge conferences, exhibitions, plantations. So even without the presence of the artist. about this?

L.D.D.: | would first of all like to point out that the “signals” that Beuys left at Bolognano—or rather within Italy, within world culture as a whole—represent a unity of space and time, the visible and the invisible, the unity between existing values and development. I do not want to refer here to my collaboration with Beuys, to our discussions, to the presence of his Studio within the famous Paradise Plantation, to the first Italian Oak planted on May 14, 1984 (the day Beuys was made an honorary citizen of Bolognano). Nor do | want to talk about his supreme works that are present in the world's most important museums. These are historic facts that are documented irrefutably in books, photographs and images. My reference to Beuys here goes well beyond what one can see and touch. | will try to clarify what | mean. In a historical period such as our own, totally shorn of human values, one can feel the Spirit of Beuys hovering over us. And if, during the course of the artist's life, this spirit seemed to many an aleatory presence, now it is clear that, if ve are to save ourselves, ve much draw nourishment from his spirituality —a spirituality that bound together the Self and Society, morality and transcendence. The true spirit of Beuys's thought centres upon freedom. Not the freedom hawked about by political parties, by bourgeois notions that isolate a reified individual. True freedom is not achieved in egoism, in corrupt solidarity with the privileges implicit in the exercise of political power. It is to be found is specific choices, with the will being an expression of freedom of spirit. It is this freedom that Beuys communicated, and which many are now searching for, because they feel the need for strong and readily-perceived signals. Itis those “signals” that bring us back to the small town of Bolognano, vvhere each expression of art is in relation to a precise message. Through our senses we live in a continual relation of give-and-take with the 917

world around us. We elaborate upon that which we see, hear, smell, and intuit: we transform it all into images, concepts, understandings and actions. We order the sensations we receive, and from them model the contents of ideas, facts and behaviour. The people who come to Bolognano are artists and intellectuals, wellknown figures or simply the curious. They are all attracted by the fascination of unity in diversity. On the one hand there's the rich greenery of nature: on the other, the creative autonomy of artists, whose works/ actions embody the universal soul. At the centre of the town stands the 16th-century Palazzo Durini, in whose forty-two rooms have been installed precious works by some of the most famous contemporary artists. In this rather ascetic place, | live and work in the company of my precious “collection of human relations! With passion, | have slowly built up these relations, all hinging upon the spirit of Joseph Beuys, which irradiates our contemporary world. Over the years | have created Piazza Beuys and Strada Harald Szeemann; restored thirteen old workshops, transforming them into veritable Night Showcases, within which international artists of different generations have displayed the prestigious fruits of their artistic research. These unusual “places of art” blend together with the lights of the town; at night, they are like so many torches that cast their light upon the entire urban fabric. Within the old town centre there is an itinerary that | have called Beyond the Museum: In Defence of Art, which offers a new way of teaching and a new way of envisaging contemporary life and culture. | have also assisted in the creation of Mario Bottinelli Montadon's Casacielo, of Omar Galliani and Laura Intini's Casa degli Ospiti, of the Casa della Musica owned by the multimedia composer and artist Emanuel Dimas De Melo Pinenta, of the Casa della Critica, the Casa dell'Arte and Stefano Soddu's Portal in the Chapel of Santa Maria Entroterra (vvhich my husband donated to the diocese). In Beuys famous plantation, | myself paid for the creation of a hypogeum of more than 1,000 mq, transforming 35 hectares into a Locus of Nature dedicated to my friend the illustrious curator Harald Szeemann, to his daughter Una and to his wife Ingeborg Lùscher. In effect, a veritable act of homage to the family... and a particular act of homage in memory of Buby Durini and Joseph Beuys. One reaches this fascinating Locus of Nature by the Viale Mònadi, a permanent work by Vitantonio Russo, an artist and economist whose work here highlights the desire for an equilibrium between Nature and Technology. The entire Paradise Plantation is crossed by Marc Bagnoli's prestigious Dharma of Enel: six Enel power pylons, carrying the entire town's electricty supply, are here transformed into a “permanent sculpture” by being painted red (the colour typical of Bagnoli's work). This sculpture symbolizes the union between scientific energy and the spiritual energy that is part of the humanity of all five continents. Another Bagnoli work is La Vigna, which is located at the edge of the Plantation. This is a work-in-progress, in which the growth of the plants is in direct relation to universal changes in Nature and Humankind. In effect, the research pursued by Bagnoli is unique within contemporary art in 9718

that it so deliberately eschews methodologies. Over the entire Plantation flies Ingeborg Lùscher's Yellow Flag, a sign of spiritual splendor. Another 72 works by 72 artists are scattered around the entire habitat. What | refer to as “Permanent Signals/ these nestle amongst the greenery of nature. Some, indeed, not easy to make out; however, the presence of a “plaque” at the site chosen by the artist conveys the certainty of a real and permanent presence, of the sharing of a thought, of involvement in a shared culture.

Beuys wanted his Paradise Plantation to contain a Training Centre for young students, a place for research that could also host conferences, debates and lectures; a venue where artists and intellectuals of various disciplines could discuss socio-economic, environmental and cultural problems in relation to art and human life. In fact there is even a basic project drawing by Beuys; dated April 12, 1984, this shows a white parallelepiped to be built at the edge of the plantation on a stretch of level ground. Then, his untimely death (January 23, 1986) resulted in my going to Milan to spread knowledge of his work and ideas. This, followed by the tragic death of my husband, led to a halt in the project, which was already at the building-permit stage. In 2003, after having worked in various countries to spread knowledge of the German Master's work through publications, conferences, donations, degree theses, oak plantations and exhibitions in international museums, | thought that—almost twenty years having passed— the time was ripe for the implementation of the project, but with one substantial difference: the “parallelepiped” vould now be built under Beuys's studio. | talked about this idea of mine with Harald Szeemann, whom | had worked with for years, and he immediately agreed with the reasons behind my decision to build underground, thus | decided that the Hypogeum should open on May 13, 2005. Unfortunately, because the Plantation is located in a seismic zone, there were numerous difficulties, which raised the costs and added to the time-consuming bureaucracy. However, after enormous sacrifices, the Hypogeum was constructed to deadline. Sadly, Szeemann himself died on February 18, 2005 and the inauguration of the structure was thus postponed to September 24. But finally Beuys's dream had become a reality. The Luogo della Natura. Servizi e Magazzini della Piantagione Paradise is the fruit of balanced consideration of internal and outside space. The relations between depth and height, between the visible and invisible, are integral to this Great Work, which is part of both the cultural microcosm and the cultural macrocosm, redrawing a veritable cosmology of Nature in the relation between Heaven and Earth. The very fact that it came into being within the context to the Defence of Nature—the work to which Joseph Beuys dedicated the last fifteen years of his life—makes it clear that this hypogeum embodies an idea and a memory capable of generating new aesthetic concepts, new approaches to creative action based upon solidarity and free collaboration. The very name, as pointed out, indicates that culture is at the service of society as a whole; knowledge accumulated over years of experience and investigation is focused upon the improvement of art and society. 9719

The fruit of slowly-matured work stands against the emptiness of false art and the insidiousness of a lack of memory. And it stands for respect of the fundamental principles of Humankind and its Mother Nature. The Locus of Nature is not a museum) it is not a Foundation or an Art Centre to house works by artists. It gives concrete form to the teachings of my Master, Joseph Beuys, in order to promote conferences, to serve as a venue for performances, concerts and dance and for the screening of videos, to offer a coordinated approach to the problems of our age. The very name of “locus” highlights both the architectural artefact and the surrounding landscape of mountains, woods and streams. However, it also eschews any strict definition; it avoids economic, political and aesthetic ambiguities. Foundation is an act of plantation— and this is why the Locus of Nature is not a foundation (in the usual sense of the term) but a Plantation. Like a tree, it drives its roots down into the soil and makes available to humankind the fruits and seeds of a masterful oeuvre, embodying the supreme equilibrium essential to the future of humanity. From the moment Beuys founded the FI.U., | took on the Presidency of the Italian Section and have since then dedicated myself to the project. Every two years | hold a Free International Forum. These are the occasions when | open new cultural “containers,” created by redeveloping existing structures for the purpose (again, drawing solely on my own creative energy and economic resources). The artists and intellectuals who come to these occasions from all over the world are my spiritual sponsors; together, with passion and generosity, we share our lived experience during the course of the entire event. After Beuys's death, Bolognano became a centre from which irradiated a new philosophy of art—a centre which, on the basis of Beuysian thought, developed a circulation of ideas that involve the whole of humanity. This centrality is no mere convention, no mere looking back; it is based upon real development and re-reading of the communication between different disciplines. In this way—and thanks to the participation of numerous artists and intellectuals—the place has become a unique locus, employing methods that are very different to those of a visibly obsolete and repetitive “art system” which does nothing but defend its own interests. For the moment, it may be unique, but | hope that it is the first of many, each looking towards the future of art and society. Because it is not possible for me to forget the voice of Beuys, | will continue to spread his teachings. To the Zurich Kunshaus | donate the concrete work of my existence, so that nothing will be lost.

And to those who read my writings, | give the meaning of my lived experience: | have tried to understand Art and Life I have tried in deep love of Humankind and Nature | have tried to understand and make myself understood I have tried to construct a New Locus | have tried...

Eva and Joseph Beuys at Villa Durini, San Silvestro Colli, Pescara

1975

920

Piazza Beuys in Bolognano, Marco Bagnoli's Quercia and Vetrina notturna — Se Introduci lo Spazio non entri nella stanza.

Forum 2003

Beuys in Italy

31 January 1970, Bologna “Gennaio 70” the projection of Eurasienstab in the video and film section

June 1970, Turin “Conceptual Art and Arte Povera” Museum of Modern Art. Exhibition of a sound work and a sculpture, supervised by Germano Celant

September 1971, Capri Beuys invited to Capri by Lucio Amelio. He produced the score: La Rivoluzione siamo noi 13 November 1971, Naples First one-man exhibition of Beuys in Italy. Lucio Amelio's Modern Art Agency, 130 drawings (1946-71), two films, a videotape, a sound work and a discussion: “Political concepts for a transformation of European society.’ Beuys made his first slate blackboard in Italy 13 March 1972, Milan One man exhibition at the Borgogna gallery 12 April 1972, Rome Discussion: Incontri Internazionali d'Arte. Rivoluzione siamo noi” Beuys made two slate blackboards

Modern Art Agency, graphics

exhibition of multiples and.

October 1974, Brescia Studio Brescia, exhibition of works, multiples and graphics December 1974, Bari Centrosei, exhibition graphics

of

works,

multiples

and

June 1975, Rome Il Cortile gallery, exhibition of works, multiples and graphics December 1975, Genoa Rotta gallery, group exhibition February 1976, Genoa Saman gallery, Hare's Blood, Sky Lamp, Earth Lamp March 1976, Pesaro Franca Mancini gallery, multiples and graphics

exhibition

of

works,

July 1976, Venice “La

10 June 1972, Naples Modern Art Agency, exhibition: “Arena-Where Could | Have Gotten If | Only Had Been Intelligent” and the action: Vitex Agnus Castus

Venice Biennale, in the sector’ entitled “Environment/Art” Beuys presented fichtkrafte and Jram Stop in the German Pavilion. Gallery Il Naviglio di Renato Cardazzo, exhibition of works, multiples and graphics November 1976, Bologna Studio Cavalieri, exhibition of works, multiples and graphics

June 1972, Venice Venice Biennale, projection of Filz-TVin the video sector

November 1976, Milan Bruna Soletti gallery, exhibition of works, multiples and graphics

October 1972, Pescara For the first time Beuys goes to Pescara, and stays at Villa Durini. Photographic documentation

December 1976, Pescara Beuys visited San Silvestro Colli and on Buby Durini's land he created Biological Plowing, Chi dice che il Coniglio non ama Joseph Beuys? and Function of art and necessity for free teaching. Photographic documentation

31 October 1972, Rome L'Attico gallery, Arena 6 March 19783, Milan Studio Marconi, Arena

November 1973, Rome “Contemporanea” international exhibition, presented Arena

Autumn 1977 Pescara Villa Durini, San Silvestro Colli, installation of the work by Beuys entitled: VVords which can hear. Photographic documentation

Summer 1974, Naples Capri, The /sland of Sleep, ChristisDead, Towel and drawings dedicated to the Leonardo Codex

November 1977 Genoa Saman Gallery, exhibition of works, multiples and graphics

3 October 1974, Pescara Incontro con Beuys in the space of Lucrezia De Domizio. Conference on Direct Democracy and creative freedom. Beuys made the sculpture Cairn, and two slate blackboards. Photographic Documentation

November 1977 Bologna Fata gallery, presentation of ram Stop exhibition of works, multiples and graphics

October 1974, Naples 924

and

12 February 1978, Pescara Discussion: “Fondazione dell'Istituto per la Rinascita dell'Agricoltura” Presentation in Italy of the FI.U. (Free International University) and the book

Azione Terza Via. He made two slate blackboards. Photographic Documentation

March 1978, Rome Santoro gallery, exhibition of works, multiples and graphics 17 March 1978, Naples Museo Pignatelli Cortes, “Tracce supervised by Germano Celant

in

Italia/”

May 1978, Bologna Studio Cavalieri, exhibition of works, multiples and graphics April 1979, Pescara-DUsseldorf Grassello operation Ca (0H)2 +H20. Photographic book. Beuys made the sculpture entitled Grassello and graphics. Photographic documentation 1979-1980, Pescara Publication of Collezione del 1979/1980 yearbook - Appello per l'alternativa

Clavicembalo,

3 April 1980, Perugia Rocca Paolina, “Beuys-Burri" meeting. Supervised by Italo Tomassoni. Beuys created seven slate blackboards May 1980, Rome De Crescenzo gallery, exhibition of works, multiples and graphics

16 May 1980, Brescia Galleria Nuovi Strumenti di Piero Cavellini, exhibition of works, multiples and graphics Summer 1980, Venice Venice Biennale: Das Kapital. Supervised by Harald Szeemann December 1980-January 1981 Coconut and Coco de Mer plantation: sculptures. Seychelles-Bolognano: drawings and various works. Photographic documentation 7 April 1981, Rome Palazzo Braschi, Continua

sculpture

and

debate:

Lotta

April 1981, Lecce Galleria Comunale, “Caro Beuys”: exhibition of artists in homage to Joseph Beuys, supervised by Toti Carpentieri

April 1981, Naples Lucio Amelio's. Modern Terremoto in Palazzo

Art

Agency,

action:

December 1981, Gibellina, Trapani Visit of Joseph Beuys May 1982, Bolognano Defence of Nature operation. The beginning of the

plantation work. Photographic documentation October 1982, Fabriano La Virgola gallery, exhibition of works, multiples and graphics 12 March 1983, Lecce

Exhibition: "Joseph Beuys e Lucio L'interrogazione dell'arte” supervised Carpentieri

Fontana. by Toti

Spring 1983, Bolognano Difesa. della Natura operation. Agricultural works. FI.U. car, FI.U. wine, In Case of Fog, Pala, 7000 Eichen, Defense of Nature. Photographic documentation

13 May 1984, Bolognano “Difesa della Natura” discussion; Piantagione happening; Joseph Beuys Honorary Citizen of Bolognano; Teca-/Incontro con Beuys happening; Presentation by Joseph Beuys and Italo Tomassoni of the book entitled /ncontro con Beuys, by Lucrezia De Domizio, Buby Durini and Italo Tomassoni (Published by D.I.A.C.). Beuys created two slate blackboards.. Photographic documentation

Venice Biennale 1984 “Il Quartetto" exhibition, supervised Bonito Oliva, ls it about a bicycle?

by Achille

September 1984, Bolognano Olivestone operation: one sculpture in stone, multiples, dravvings and graphics. Presentation at EI.A.C., Paris, in October. Photographic documentation 13 December 1984, Bolognano Joseph Beuys went to Bolognano for Olivestone (5 tubs in stone — indivisible sculpture). Photographic documentation December 1984, Castello di Rivoli Beuys installs, together with Lucrezia De Domizio, the Olivestone work. Photographic documentation May 1985, Pescara Ombelico di Venere project. Presentation at FI.A.C., Paris, in October. Photographic documentation November 1985, L'Aquila Multimedial Center Quarto di San Giusta. Exhibition of works, multiples and graphics 23 December 1985, Naples Museo Capodimonte, “Palazzo Regale” exhibition

January 1986, Gibellina, Trapani Visit of Joseph Beuys 925

Lucrezia De Domizio near Joseph Beuys

signing Tram Stop, Pescara 1977

Multiples in Italy

1. Disco Ja Ja Ja Ja Ja, 1970 Nee Nee Nee Nee Nee

Album with LP record, text and photos Edition of 500, numbered and stamped Gabriele Mazzotta Editore, Milan Schellmann catalogue no. 13 2. Ja Ja Ja Ja Ja, 1969 Nee Nee Nee Nee Nee

Pile of felt with recording tape, 32 minutes, TORReZ De 2: Recording from Fluxus Concert of same name, Dusseldorf Academy of Art 1968 Numbered edition of 100, signature stamped on the tape + edition of 10, 17 x 34 x 34 cm and recording tape of 64 minutes, signed and numbered as above Gabriele Mazzotta Editore, Milan Schellmann catalogue no. 14 3. VVe Are the Revolution, 1972

Silkscreen on polyester, handwritten text stamped, 9./bca102fem Edition of 180, signed and numbered (+ 18 artist's proofs) + poster and postcard Photo: Giancarlo Pancaldi Edition Staeck, Heidelberg, and Edizioni Lucio Amelio, Naples Schellmann catalogue no. 49

4. Vitex Agnus Castus, 1973 Color offset 60.5 x 44 cm Edition of 1000, signed and numbered (+ some a.p.) Edition Staeck, Heidelberg, and Edizioni Lucio Amelio, Naples Schellmann catalogue no. 73 5. Hearing, 1974 Offset print (3 Colours), 31 x 23.5 cm Edition of 500, signed and numbered (+ some a.p.) Photo by Ute Klophaus from the action Hauptstrom Bolaffi and Mondadori Editori, Turin Schellmann catalogue no. 99 6. People are Marvelous in Foggia, 1974

Book of scores with 75 silkscreens on grey card 31.5 x 22 x 2.5 cm. Contains statements by Beuys

relating to actions Edition of 180, signed and numbered (+ some ap.) Edition Staeck, Heidelberg, Edizioni Lucio Amelio, Naples, and Studio Marconi, Milan Schellmann catalogue no. 100 7. Pass for Entering the Future, 1974

Paper sheet with handwritten addition, 42 x 29.7 cm Edition of 200, signed, numbered and stamped (+ a.p.) Edizioni Lucio Amelio, Naples Schellmann catalogue no. 126 8. Meeting with Beuys, 1974 Silkscreen (b & w) on board, 100 x 70 cm Edition of 150, signed and numbered + poster and postcard Photo: Buby Durini Edizioni Lucrezia De Domizio, Pescara Schellmann catalogue no. 138 9. Bruno Corà - Tea, 1975

Bottle with herb tea, leaded top, printed label, in glazed wooden box with glass (+V a.p.). 28.5 x 11 x 10.5 cm Edizioni Lucio Amelio, Naples Schellmann catalogue no. 159 10. Genoa, 1976

Colour postcard with brown silkscreen, 10 x 15 cm Series of 100, signed and numbered (+ 20 a. p.) Edizioni Saman Gallery, Genoa Schellmann catalogue no. 188

11 ram*Stop 1947 Silkscreen on card, 100 x 63 cm Edition of 150, signed and numbered + poster and postcard Photo: Buby Durini for Venice Biennale Edizioni Lucrezia De Domizio, Pescara Schellmann catalogue no. 217 12. Chi dice, 1977

Printed postcard (blue/grey/violet), unlimited and unsigned 929

From a creative gesture by Professor Giuseppe Consoli: Who says the hare doesn't love Joseph Beuys Edizioni Lucrezia De Domizio, Pescara Schellmann catalogue no. P 45 13. Open the Mouth Wide, 1978 Silkscreen (red), Ses

OnI

Edition of 200, signed and numbered by Joseph Beuys and Jorg Frank Edizioni Lucrezia De Domizio, Pescara Schellmann catalogue no. 246 14. Levitation in Italy, 1978

Offset (blue), 37 x 22 Edition of 200, signed Edizioni Lucio Amelio, Schellmann catalogue

cm and numbered (+ 50 a.p.) Naples no. 247

15. 7he Hoe FI.U., 1978 Cast-iron hoe with olive-wood handle, branded stamp, SS022Eex tic) Discussion: “Foundation for the Rebirth of Agriculture, February 12, 1978, Pescara Edition of 35, signed and numbered Edizioni Lucrezia De Domizio, Pescara Schellmann catalogue no. 248 16. Hare, 1978

Colour offset, 83 x 51.5 cm Edition of 60, signed and numbered (+ 10 a.p.) Edizioni Lucio Amelio, Naples Schellmann catalogue no. 249 17. Flight of the Eagle to the Valley and Back, 1978 Lithograph (violet) on Edition of 120, signed Edizioni Lucio Amelio, Schellmann catalogue

grey card, 103 x 26 cm and numbered (+ 15 a.p.) Naples no. 250

18. Von Gloeden postcards

Series of 11 Italian postcards + handwriting by Beuys, 14 x 9or9 x 14m Original postcards with photographs by Baron von Gloeden (1856-1931):

Greek theatre at Taormina (edition of 61) View of the Grand Hotel San Domenico (edition of 20) Fisherman of Taormina (edition of 2) The Old Abbey (edition of 4) Greek Theatre at Taormina (edition of 2) Palazzo Duca Santo Stefano (edition of 17) Peppino (edition of 60) ‘Addio a Napoli” (edition of 67) Ahmed (edition of 135) Mohammed (edition of 170) Maria (edition of 2) “Asrah” (edition of 360) ‘Amicizia ” (edition of 1) All the postcards are signed and numbered Edizioni Lucio Amelio, Naples Schellmann catalogue nos. 251-263 19. Third Way Action - Promotional Initiative, 1978 Publication of 80 pages, 21 x 15.5 cm Unlimited production Free International University Edition, Germany Edizioni Lucrezia De Domizio, Pescara 20. Foundation for the Rebirth of Agriculture, 1978

Two silkscreens (b & w), 93 x 63 and 63 x 93 cm Edition of 75, signed, numbered and stamped (+ 10 a.p .) + poster and postcard Photo: Buby Durini - Interior and Exterior, Documenta VI, Kassel Separate editions Edizioni Lucrezia De Domizio, Pescara Schellmann catalogue nos. 264-265

21. The Thought of the FI.U., 1978

db. *

lati Ax

Silkscreen (b & w), 50 x 70 cm Edition of 150, signed and numbered (+ a.p.) Photo Buby Durini - TV Interview Edizioni Lucrezia De Domizio, Pescara Schellmann catalogue no. 266 22. In Head and in Pot, 1978

Silkscreen (b & w) with handwritten addition, 100 x 70 cm Edition of 100, signed and numbered + edition of XXX (+ 20 a.p.) Photo: Caroline Tisdall. Edinburgh action, 1974 Edizione Factotum Art, Verona Schellmann catalogue no. 268 931

23. Glacier Sponge Deathbed, 1979 2 heliogravures, pencil lines, I00Se70%cm Edition of 75, signed and numbered (+ XX a.p.) Poem-text by Beuys written in 1958 Edizione Factotum Art, Verona Schellmann catalogue nos. 308-309 24. Greta Garbo and the Felt Patch, 1979

Colour offset (grey/brown) and handwritten additions, 64 x 94 cm Edition of 40, signed on the back and numbered Kunstmuseum Lucerne and Edizioni Lucio Amelio, Naples Schellmann catalogue no. 310 25. Grassello Ca(0H)2 + H20O, 1979

Offset (black/red) FI.U., 70x 49%em Edition of 50, signed and numbered + poster e postcard Edizioni Lucrezia De Domizio, Pescara Schellmann catalogue no. 311 26. Grassello Ca (OH)2 + H2O, 1979 Publication of 42 pages in colour (red / black), Siles2aem Edition of 200, numbered, signed and with black FI.U. stamp and green Wahit die Grunen stamp (+ unlimited volumes) Edizioni Lucrezia De Domizio, Pescara Schellmann catalogue no. 312 27. Collection of the Harpsichord Yearbook, 1979-80

Publication of 16 pages, 50 x 35 cm Edition of 1000 Edizioni Lucrezia De Domizio, Pescara

28. Green with Rage, 1980 Magazine L'Espresso, stamped, in zinc box, S0 SALI Interview with Beuys Edition of 20, signed and numbered Edizioni Factotum Art, Verona schellmann catalogue no. 365 932

29. Art=Capital (Blackboard), 1980 Slate blackboard in wooden frame, 31 x 44 cm, with red silkscreen

Edition of 50, signed and numbered (+ X a.p.) Edizioni Factotum Art, Verona Schellmann catalogue no. 367

30. Oil Can FI.U., 1980 Metal container with olive oil, 53 x 30.5 cm Edition of 50, signed, numbered and stamped (+ X a.p.) Edizioni Factotum Art, Verona Schellmann catalogue no. 329 31. /deas and Actions, 1980

Tape recorded cassette, stamped, 11 x 7 x 15 cm Interview with Beuys and Caroline Tisdall at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum of New York Edition of 21, signed, numbered and stamped + unlimited production Edizioni Lucio Amelio, Naples Schellmann catalogue no. 331 32. Only 2425 More Days, 1980

Offset FI.U., 68.5 x 48.5 cm Edition of 150, signed and numbered (+ 25 a.p.) Photo: Buby Durini Edizioni Lucrezia De Domizio, Pescara Schellmann catalogue no. 333

33. Tropical Night,

1980

Handmade woodcut on paper, 62 x 46 cm Edition of 7 signed, numbered and titled Work on the habitat of the Seychelles Edizioni Lucrezia De Domizio, Pescara Schellmann catalogue no. 337 34. Planting a Coconut, 1980 Handmade woodcut on paper, 46 x 62 cm Edition of 7 signed, numbered and titled (+ 1 a.p. on yellowish paper) Work on the habitat of the Seychelles Edizioni Lucrezia De Domizio, Pescara

Schellmann catalogue no. 338 933

35. Venetian FragmentsNIIA154iit, 1980 Series of 5 silkscreens on black card, 35 x 50 cm

Edition of 50, signed and numbered (+ X a.p.) Edizioni Factotum Art, Verona Schellmann catalogue nos. 339-343

36. Defence of Nature, 1981

(Harpsichord) Silkscreen (b & w), 99.5 x 67.5 cm Edition of 300, signed and numbered (+ some a.p.), poster and postcard Photo: Buby Durini Edizioni Lucrezia De Domizio, Pescara and Yvon Lambert, Paris Schellmann catalogue no. 378 37. Art is a Mosquito ..., 1981

Portfolio with 4 photo etchings (b & w), 80 x 60 cm Edition of 50, signed and numbered (+ X a.p.) Edizioni Factotum Art, Verona Schellmann catalogue nos. 395-398 38. Lotta Continua booklet, 1981

17 pages, text by Arcangelo Izzo, 24 x 17 cm Edition of 250, signed and numbered with red pen Discussion for the newspaper Lotta Continua Palazzo Braschi, Rome Photo: Buby Durini Edizioni Lucrezia De Domizio, Pescara and Lapis Art, Salerno Schellmann catalogue no. 381

39. | feed myself wasting energy, 1982 Paper plate with handwritten text, 15 x 20 cm Edition ofVII, signed and numbered Edizioni Lucio Amelio, Naples Schellmann catalogue no. 408 40. Collection of Graphics, 1982 Series of 8 prints: Photo etching on Fabriano paper, 50 x 35 cm Edition of 100, signed and numbered Photo: “Capital” environment —Venice Biennale, 1980 Edizioni Piccolo Museo, Novoli, (Lecce) Photo etchings on Fabriano paper, 50 x 35 cm Edition of 100, signed and numbered 934

Edizioni Piccolo Museo, Novoli, (Lecce)

Etching on Fabriano paper, 50 x 35 cm Edition of 34, signed and numbered Edizioni Piccolo Museo, Novoli, (Lecce) Etching with pencil drawing on Fabriano paper, 50 x 35 cm Edition of 34, signed and numbered Edizioni Piccolo Museo, Novoli, (Lecce) Offset on silver foil, stamped, 34.6 x 23.3 cm Edition of 20, signed and numbered Edizioni Piccolo Museo, Novoli, (Lecce) Schellmann catalogue n.0.T. 449.456 41. DM 90,000, 1982 Facsimile print (collage) in an iron frame, 70 x 50 cm Edition of 100, signed and numbered Edizioni Factotum Art, Verona Schellmann catalogue no. 461 42. Defence of Nature, 1982

Canvas with black and red writing, stamped, 105 x 390 cm Edition of 20, signed and numbered Edizioni Lucrezia De Domizio, Pescara Schellmann catalogue no. 365 43. Element, 1982

Copper plate and iron plate, each 44 x 31.5 x 1 cm Edition of 50, signed, numbered e titled on label + X copies (+4 a.p.) Edizioni Factotum Art, Verona Schellmann catalogue no. 463

44. Androgyne, 1983 Sanitary paper bag, 39 x 9.5 cm, with handwritten addition Edition of 72, signed and numbered + XII copies Edizioni Lucio Amelio, Naples Schellmann catalogue no. 466

45. Earthquake in the Palace, 1983

Color offset, 31 x 54 cm Edition of 44, signed and numbered (+ some a.p.) Edizioni Lucio Amelio, Naples Schellmann catalogue no. 471 46. Shovel 7000 Eichen, 1983

Cast-iron shovel with handle in ash, 135 x 30 cm Edition of 35, signed and numbered (+ some a.p.) 935

Edizioni Lucrezia De Domizio, Pescara Schellmann catalogue no. 476

47. A.E.1.0.U. (Defence of Nature), 1983

*. im B4fi78 “as.

Two-part color offset, each part 70 x 100 cm Edition of 200, signed and numbered Photo by Buby Durini - A.E./.0.U. magazine Publishers: Bruno Corà, Rome and Lucrezia De Domizio, Pescara Schellmann catalogue no. 481 48. A One Hour Drama, 1983

Video tape SONY Betamax L-250 Bottle of F/.U. wine Edition of 10, numbered and signed Film by Buby Durini Edizioni Lucrezia De Domizio, Pescara

Schellmann catalogue no. 482 49. A One Hour Drama, 1984

Video tape SONY Betamax L-250 Bottle of F/.U. oil

Edition of 10, signed and numbered Film by Buby Durini Edizioni Lucrezia De Domizio, Pescara Schellmann catalogue no. 483 50. Vine FI.U., 1983

ni LALA dee

a) Bottle of red wine with FI.U. label - Montepulciano d'Abruzzo Unlimited production + EI.U. label, studied by Joseph Beuys with silkscreened sign b) Carton of 12 bottles of red wine - Montepulciano d'Abruzzo - FI.U. Carton and bottle labels with silkscreened signature Edizioni Lucrezia De Domizio, Pescara Schellmann catalogue no. 484 51. Defence of Nature, 1984

Color offset, 60 x 82 cm Edition of 300, signed and numbered + poster and postcard Photo by Buby Durini Edizioni Lucrezia De Domizio, Pescara Schellmann catalogue no. 486 936

52. 7000 Oaks, 1984 Two-part colour offset each part 69.5 x 31.5 cm Text of the FI.U. publication in Kassel at Documenta VII Edition of 150, signed and numbered in red

Edizioni Lucrezia De Domizio, Pescara and Segno magazine Schellmann catalogue no. 487

53. F/.U. Oil Bottle, 1984 Bottle of olive oil, 26 x 8 cm in diameter Unlimited production Label studied by Joseph Beuys with silkscreened signature Edition of 12, signed and numbered (+ 12 a.p.), with gold label Edizioni Lucrezia De Domizio, Pescara Schellmann catalogue no. 504

54. Blotting Paper — Olivestone, 1984 Printed blotting paper dipped in olive oil, 29.5 x 8.5 cm Edition of 250, signed and numbered Edizioni Lucrezia De Domizio, Pescara Schellmann catalogue no. 505

55. Capri-Batterie, 1985 Wooden box 19 x 19 Edition of 200, signed Editore Lucio Amelio, Schellmann catalogue

x 19 cm+ electric-light bulb + lemon and numbered Napoli no. 546

(From Joseph Beuys. Die Multiples, Schellmann, Munich 1992)

937

J"DOIFSESEAPÌDE BOLOGNANO.

Ù de i ASN

MAGGIO 1984

Who is Joseph Beuys?

With his life and work, Joseph Beuys is the figure that best represents the centrifugal and anti-traditional Energy that contemporary art has produced in the last decades. An atypical character with respect to the artistic currents of his day—it has proved impossible to place him in Minimalism or Arte Povera, among Performers or Conceptuals—Beuys succeeded in permeating his entire person with art, and art with his person. This means much more than the unity between art and life. Placing himself in the artwork itself, Beuys intends to underscore the anthropological power of art.

The need to talk, communicate, express onself using every means available, which Beuys used these words to underscore, was fully accomplished in the work of a lifetime. For Beuys, to be an artist meant living a life together with others, seeking therein solid relationships and fraternal cooperation, that “elementary and deep-seated understanding of everything that takes place on this earth” because what happens on our plant also happens within us. We cannot survive if we don't talk to one another. Every man needs others, because the forces that are intrinsic to each individual, whether plant or animal, require nourishment through communication and love. And Beuys cannot help but rise up again and go on living. Akin to Beuys is every man who has ever decided to be a real man, that is, an artist. | believe that this is the message he conveyed to us through the way he practiced his entire life and his artistry.

Joseph Beuys was born in Krefeld, West Germany, on May 12, 1921 and died prematurely in Dusseldorf on January 23, 1986. He spent his childhood in Kleve, a small town on the left bank of the lower Rhine, a flat area rich in marshland. This original environment had a great influence on the artist, as did his training and studies, remarkable for their scientific inclinations. However, the young Beuys did not ignore the other fields of culture: art—vwith which he became familiar at the studio of Kleve sculptor Achilles Moortgat; literature and philosophy, from romanticism to Knut Hamsun, from Kierkegaard to Nietzsche; and music, especially Wagner and Satie. His deep sense of social solidarity must have been strong even then, as shown by his enrolment in the School of Medicine after finishing high school in 1940. But the World War Il was to change his plans: he was called to join the Luftwaffe as a bomber pilot. Sent to the eastern front, his “Stuka” plane was hit while flying on a desolated Crimean plane during an action, and he was found, half-frozen and with a serious head injury, by a Tartar tribe, which rescued him and took him to their tents. These simple people cared for him, covering him in animal fat and felt blankets. This idea of the generation of heat through natural materials became a recurrent theme in his subsequent artistic work. After the war Beuys was a profoundly changed man, both in body and spirit. It 940

previous pages

Banner for Joseph Beuys. Difesa della Natura operation, Bolognano, May 13, 1984

was then that he decided to dedicate his life to art. In 1947 he enrolled in the Dusseldorf Kunstakademie, graduating in 1951. But as usual, he did not limit his artistic research to the narrow world of academic art. It was at this time that he approached Rudolph Steiner's anthroposophy, something he would go back to constantly in the future. In 1961 he was appointed Professor of Monumental Sculpture at the Dùsseldorf Academy. In the early 1970s he became close friends with the American George Maciunas, the ideator of Fluxus, and participated in several public exhibitions with his group of artists. Its Members included Nam June Paik, Wolf Vostell, John Cage, Daniel Spoerri, Charlotte Moorman, Thomas Schmit, Robert Filliu, Bazon Brock. With Fluxus, Beuys shared the idea of art as an instrument of knowledge. Art is everywhere and for everyone. At the same time, he began to have his own exhibitions, where he presented actions, sculptures and drawings. Some titles, now famous, include: How to Explain Paintings to a Dead Hare (1965), Eurasia and Homogeneous Infiltration for Grand Piano (1966), Vakuum Masse

(1968), / Want to See my Mountains (1971). These experiences helped to define his artistic identity, which never became part of any pre-constituted or consolidated movements. In the second half of the 1960s, the artist approached the more overtly political and social aspects of the culture of his day. In 1967 he founded the Student Party, in 1971 the Organization for Direct Democracy through Referendum, and in 1974, with Heinrich Béll, the Free International University. The latter initiative was probably a consequence of his dismissal from the Academy in 1972. In fact, Beuys had made problems for the Director and then for the Finance Minister with his insistence on accepting in his course all the students who had failed the Admission Exam. His was not a permissive promotion but a decision to question the criteria of higher education admission in general: the University is for those who desire to increase their knowledge and to acquire the specific tools to that end, rather than a place for those that already have them. As part of his involvement in the EI.U. in the late 1970s and early 1980s, Beuys became interested in the budding Green Movement, as a transparent and nonideological force. This movement focused on environmental and ecological problems and thus on that defence of nature which was to characterize Beuys' entire activity during the last years of his life. When the movement turned into a political party, losing the characteristic of a spontaneous and autonomous social group, Beuys stopped participating. The movements Beuys created have always been permeated with a proud independence where systems of power are concerned. The main goal was always to make progress without compromises that threaten truth and plurality from within. Beuys' organizations reflect his nomadic spirit, always on the move in a quest for the anthropological inheritance that man, in his madness, has neglected.

The world of international culture began to take notice of the German master Joseph Beuys, dedicating newspaper and magazine articles to him, especially regarding the marketable aspects and the high prices that his works (everyday objects like sleds, felt suits, wine, spades, oil, hoes...) obtained at London and New York auctions. But many still vanted to know—who is Joseph Beuys, really? An extravagant artist who wears a felt hat? A nature-loving poet? A preacher and philosopher? 941

Joseph Beuys was essentially a man who loved his fellow human beings and the nature they live in. He invented no methods, but with generous humanity dedicated his entire life to the research and improvement of the existing ones. The crisis of contemporary humanity, its loss of identity, is the main motivation behind his commitment as a man and as an artist. Through reality, he searched for a way to truth, which is not to be found in an arbitrary invention of the systems in which we live, but already exists in the world: human beings have only to rediscover it in themselves and in nature. Humanity and nature, in a newly found harmony, will together build a true world. This is the core of Beuysian thought. Joseph Beuys put humanity and its creative energy at the center of his artistic research. It is this that leads him to his involvement in politics, economics, agriculture, ecology, and everything that surrounds us in our everyday life. | have always considered Beuys a diamond. A diamond shows many faces, each one, even if compact and unitary, making the others visible through transparency. So to understand and judge Beuys' work it is absolutely necessary to conceive it as a whole, analyzing the complexity of its articulations, his attention to social issues and all their implications, and thus be able to grasp the real motivations behind his activity and his art. Beuys desired to measure himself against the ideas of cultural protagonists of the past such as Goethe, Steiner, Schelling, Novalis and others; he always believed that only confrontation with the past can lead to a concrete vision of the present. But he also loved to measure himself against the student, the countryman, the intellectual, because for him communication was the fundamental value of any social relation and regards all fields of creativity. For Beuys, creativity is closely linked to human nature, and this, in turn, is deeply embedded in a sense of freedom. EVERYONE IS AN ARTIST, Beuys said. This slogan has often been misunderstood. Beuys did not mean that everyone is a painter. He was referring to the abilities and skills each of us can apply to any profession or trade, whatever it may be. With this concept, Beuys expressed his total respect for human creativity and activity; here, we rediscover the concreteness of his ideas. The creative act as an act of freedom, of free inventive humanity: an anthropology of creativity, creatively living life and the universe, because we are capable of shaping the social, of conceiving it not as inert matter but as the whole of our intellective energies. The following points on creativity fundamentally represent Beuys' approach to the social problems of humanity and to economic and educational issues: The concept of creativity is an intrinsic component of everyone's nature: it is inextricably bound up with freedom. The concept of freedom has two aspects: the first concerns the individual, who is free to do as he or she pleases; the second and more important has to do with interpersonal relationships, which means sharing the fruit of our free actions with others. Communication is the fundamental value of all social relations. For Beuys this meant more than a mere possibility: Ve must show what we have produced 942

with our freedom. In each individual, creativity is articulated on three main levels: thought, feeling and will. This is an evident reference to his “Theory of Sculpture”; we can therefore state that creativity constitutes the realization of the theory. Creativity is not an exclusive privilege of humanity. In a different context, a tree might also possess energy for thought, feeling and will. Criticism of materialism, the fruit of unilateral development of the powers of thought that ignores other vital aspects of human and natural creativity. The need to find a solution, looking for an alternative to both capitalism and consumerism. The need to develop real models for a social order in which human faculties are realized in their full potential. The attainment of freedom for humanity, for a nation, for the whole world, must go hand in hand with the attainment of nonviolence. The revolution is within us. This is the second slogan of the German master. The only possible revolution lies in our ideas. VVE ARE THE REVOLUTION. Only in our behaviour and in comprehension is there evolution. Beuys sculptured with his word. With his actions, he taught. He did not look for utopia, he simply practiced it: his famous Concrete Utopia, comprehensible only for those who feel the need to invent a different way of feeling, perceiving, knowing and acting. Beuys' Social Sculpture is a permanent process of continuous evolution and interchange between ecology, politics, economics, history and culture = all the elements that determine the social system.

Only through Living Sculpture is it possible to unhinge the miserable mechanism that modern humanity has entrapped itself in. A cooperation between free human beings of different origins, races, religions, social, cultural and economic conditions. There is a strong symbolic connotation throughout Beuys' work, that partly goes back to his scientific experimentation, and partly to the creative and intuitive part of human nature. Let us consider his clothing, for example: the hat, an initiatory element; the jacket of the “fisher of souls” that reminds us of a Shaman or of Christ; the fragment of a hare on his chest, a similitude that establishes the principle of movement and metempsychosis; his jeans, a sign of revolution in social customs; the shirt always open, an indication to transparence, uprightness; the mountain boots, a sign of dynamism, of the wayfarer. Beuysian materials have a wide range of symbolism. | have called Joseph Beuys the most emblematic sculptor of the twentieth century: a Sculptor of Forms, a Sculptor of Souls. For his formal sculptures, Beuys used all those materials | call Visible and that, metaphorically speaking, indicate energy and heat (copper, felt, fat, wine ...), while for his Social Sculpture - Living Sculpture - he used Invisible materials (words, gestures, intuition, smell, noise, sounds, behaviour ... ) to create solidarity and collaboration between different people, always respectful of human freedom and creativity. We see, then, that the material he used in his creations, actions and debates have no relation whatsoever with those used in Arte Povera or by American Minimalists. His works go beyond the mere representative process and inter pret the flux of human energy in its natural and primitive sense, the flow of life and death, of humanity and of the sociality of art. Thus we see how for Beuys art and life were one and the same. This is the 943

meaning of Anthropological Art, a concept that divides new from traditional art, present from past. The art of Joseph Beuys looks constantly towards the future: the future of art and of humanity. Beuys also dealt with economy questions in his art, embedded in the social and cultural aspects of life. Beuys' third slogan, KUNST=KAPITAL, addresses culture as the primary capital of society. The first great economy stems from the capacities of human beings. Concepts that the German master developed throughout his life with every possible means and in the first person. He proposed education as the main resource of the social body, creating pedagogical formulas of extreme importance for the rebirth of civilized nations, such as his Office for Direct Democracy and the FI.U. (Free International University). I would also like to recall Joseph Beuys in the Permanent Conference in his Appeal for an Alternative and Third Way Action - Promotional Initiative — Idea and practical attempt to create an alternative to the existing social systems in the East and in the West. Beuys warns humanity of the increasing danger of the ecological crisis. Of the growing threat of war. Of the widening gap between rich and poor. Of the perennial hate between people of different races and religions, the evils of extreme nationalism, ex ploitation, oppression, humiliation, violence. Of the arrogance of concentrated economic and political power. Of the madness of biological and social manipulation. Beuys was before his time in calling for the unity of Europe through free markets and common currency. All these issues were discussed during those famous hundred days of Documenta VI, and are of great topicality today. Joseph Beuys hoped that one day everyone would obtain equal opportunities and rights. The discussions developed over thirteen meetings, which might be summarized as follows: 1. Discussion of the Periphery—that is, of the future of small countries and those areas of society which have no real access to political power. 2. Discussion of nuclear energy and alternative energies. The issue had become enormously important in West Germany, where the Greens were beginning to gain a following which would increase over time. Forms of alternative energy were proposed, which would not see all power concentrated in the hands of the State. 3. Discussion of Community. Accounts of experiences of cooperation and self-determination.

4. First discussion of the media: manipulation. The influence exerted by private interest groups and by the State. 5. Second discussion of the media: alternatives. Limited circulation press, development of cable TV and “pirate” films independent of multinational distribution chains. 944

radio;

6. Week of Human Rights. A discussion of CHARTA ‘77 and other issues relating to human rights, both in the East and the West. 7. Discussion of urban decay and institutions—that is, the problems Capitalism has created within cities, and the issue of improvements to such institutions as prisons, mental hospitals, schools, etc. 8. Discussion of Immigration. This was linked with the former and underlined the needs to restore trust, self-identity and work in those countries from which the flow of emigration was most substantial. 9. Discussion of Northern Ireland. An attempt to examine the true causes of the problem. 10. Discussion of transformation models, compared to the models of repression applied throughout the world. 11. Discussion of violent behaviour—above urban terrorism.

all as linked to those years of

12. Discussion of work and unemployment. A demonstration that the roots of unemployment were to be found in the capitalist mechanisms motivated solely by profit. 13. Thirteenth discussion. An analysis of 100 days of discussions. He advocated a market economy - “organic economical order"; a practical modification of the concept of Money; a social order based on the right to work. He sought to safeguard endangered products of the earth and biological plowing. He initiated a true partnership for the subsistence of Third World countries. And here | feel the need to emphasize the prophetic importance of the artistshaman joseph Beuys, standard-bearer of a Future thought of social necessities that addresses the contingencies of the Present. Beuys was the active precursor of all the economic, environmental, humanitarian, political and cultural questions that torment the humanity inhabiting planet Earth. Defence of Nature is Joseph Beuys' last great masterpiece. His fourth slogan, a phenomenological unicum of world art. A colossal operation carried out in Italy during the last fifteen years of his life, the sedimentation of a rich operative and spiritual activity in which he enjoyed my constant collaboration, in a context in which the limitless plays a primary role of specularity between the expansion of thought and human energy. The relationship with Nature has always been a constant theme in Beuys' work. One that began with his archetypal drawings as a young man and that was revived in Italy, with his defence of humanity and Safeguarding of Nature. It is in Italy that his Concrete Utopia is realized through the triad of “Plantations” Seychelles-Bolognano-Kassel in Utopia of the Earth. Joseph Beuys' Defence of Nature is not only an ecological concept but must also be understood in an anthropological sense. Defence of humanity, of human values, of creativity. 945

Much has been written about his life and work in the years following Bueys' death, but little and too little - perhaps deliberately - has been said of the important signals that he left in Italy in the last fifteen years of his life, and specifically in the Abruzzi. Italy has always been beloved by the Northern romantics, a line that runs from Goethe to Nietzsche to Beuys himself who, however, radically modifies the contemplative condition of this topos of German culture, reversing it

into a transformation of the humus. From 1971 until a few days before his death, Beuys spent more time in Italy than in any other country. This, | think, was no coincidence, but rather a definite cultural choice deter mined by the strong intuitive pressure of the human and natural elements on Beuys the Man and the Artist. It was in the Abruzzi that he found the fertile ground to expand his Credo, made of love and fraternal collaboration between free and creative human beings. I met Beuys by chance, on the ferry to Capri. He was with his family and with Lucio Amelio. My long journey into and beyond art began that weekend together, so many years ago. A journey that changed my entire existence. A constant both public and private work to which my life is committed, today more than ever before. There were three important public debates in Pescara and Bolognano: /ncontro con Beuys (1974) and Fondazione per la Rinascita dell'Agricoltura (1978), where he introduced the F..U. in Italy for the first time with the publication in Italian of the red booklet Terza Via, “Third Way The third debate was the conclusion of nine years of intense work on his operation Defence of Nature (1984), that had begun in 1975 with Aratura Biologica and is still going on today. Other works stem from this context, such as Grassello-Pescara-Dùsseldorf, Il Clavicembalo, Vino e Olio FI.U., Piantagione Coco de Mer e Coconut Seychelles, Auto FI.U., Guggenheim Museum, 7000 Eichen, Piantagione Paradise Bolognano, Olivestone, Ombelico di Venere and Corpo Unico Fotografico - Difesa della Natura — a testimony to a unique historic course. Two works remained unfinished due to the artist's death: Fame nel mondo - Svecciatoio and Oper azione Elicottero. In Bolognano, Beuys had an emblematic studio: his Piantagione which he called Paradise, a project of 7000 trees in danger of extinction, is still active. We also recall that on 13 May 1984, on the same day the Defence of Nature debate took place, Beuys was awarded Honorary Citizenship of Bolognano. But as far as | am concerned, Beuys' real Defence of Nature operation began after the Master's death. It has become my own personal commitment in life to expand Beuysian thought and to make it understood. Memory is not to be preserved but to be reconstructed. I have done everything possible: lectures, essays, meetings, publications, debates, university theses, donations, | even created the magazine Risk Arte Oggi, rooted in Beuysian philosophy. In all cireumstances | have always respected and reflected the two most singular aspects of his thought: re-appropriation and free creativity. The first consists in a rare propensity for reconstructing more than conquer ing ex novo, for discovering more than inventing, for therapeutic improvement more than substitution: a question, then, of the necessity to expand, to broad946

en human energy for the knowledge of truth. A quest that finds fulfillment in the Beuys' life, in his need to speak, to communicate with every possible means. The second aspect is characterized by that famous free creativity that Beuys preached and taught throughout the world. Fifteen years after the famous Defence of Nature debate, on May 13, 1999, Piazza Joseph Beuys was inaugurated in Bolognano. And it is not only the name of the square that recalls his memory, but the square itself, built according to his very concepts: Nature and Humanity. Piazza Joseph Beuys is in the form of an amphitheater, facing the valley below. lt has four great terraced flower beds planted with Rosemary (energy), Laurel (the otherness of art), an Olive Tree (warmth and productivity) and an Oak (strength and longevity). This tree was planted on the day of the inauguration of the square by Beuys' friend Harald Szeemann in memory of that first oak Beuys had planted on May 13, 1984, in his Piantagione Paradise, following Kassel's 7000 Oaks. The four beds symbolically represent the four Cardinal Points of Beuysian philosophy: Cosmic Love (Collaboration), Communication, Creativity, and Human Values. Joseph Beuys is one of the most emblematic and significant figures of world art since the Second World War. He is the artist who has best succeeded in incarnating the human figure of the transcendence of art, channelling his efforts towards the utopian territory of natural energy and spiritual communication: reality as a phenomenological spectrum of human possibilities. The art of Joseph Beuys, in its opening to the Future, is still far from being understood. The entire third millennium will be rooted in Beuysian thought. As long as one plant and one human being still exists on the planet Earth, the Regal Art of joseph Beuys will live on.

947

Autobiography by Joseph Beuys Beuys himself gave a list of the main events in his life, first time for the "Festival de l'Art Nouveau” in Aix-la-Chapelle on July, 20, 1964, successively updating it for an exhibition at Basel Kunstmuseum on November,

16, 1969.

Joseph Beuys' catalogue 1921 - Kleve exhibition of a wound drawn together with plaster 1922 - Exhibition at Rindern farm, near Kleve 1923 - Exhibition of a moustache cup (contents: coffee with egg) 1924 - Kleve, Official exhibition of work by local children 1925 - Kleve, Documentation: “Beuys as Exhibitor” 1926 - Kleve, Exhibition of a stagleader 1927 - Kleve, Exhibition of radiation 1928 - Kleve, First exhibition of an excavated trench.Kleve. Exhibition to explain the difference between loamy sand and sandy loam 1929 - Exhibition at the grave of Genghis Khan 1930 - Donsbrlggen, Exhibition of heather together with medicinal herbs 1931 - Kleve, “Connecting” exhibition. Kleve, Exhibition of connections 1933 - Kleve, Underground exhibition (digging beneath the ground parallel to the surface). 1940 - Posen, Exhibition of an arsenal (together with Heinz Sielmann, Hermann Ulrich Asemissen and Eduard Spranger). Exhibition at Erfurt-Bindersleben airfield. Exhibition at Erfurt-Nord airfield. 1942 - Sebastopol, Exhibition of my friend. Sebastopol, Exhibition during the interception of a JU 87

1943 - Oranienburg, Interim exhibition (together with Fritz Rolf Rothenburg and Heinz Sielmann) 1945 - Kleve, Exhibition of cold 1946 - Kleve, warm exhibition. Heilbronn, Central Station happening 1947 - Kleve Artists’ Union: “Profile of the successor” Kleve, exhibition for the hard of hearing 1948 - Kleve Artists’ Union: “Profile of the successor” Dusseldorf, exhibition in the Pillen Bettenhaus. Krefeld, “Kullhaus” exhibition (together with A.R. Lynen) 1949 - Heerdt, Total exhibition, three consecutive times. Kleve Artists' Union: “Profile of the Successor” 1950 - Beuys reads Finnegan's Wake in “Haus Wylermeer"” Kranenburg, Haus van der Grinten: Giocondologie. Kleve Artists’ Union: Profile of the successor 1951 - Kranenburg, van der Grinten collection, Beuys: sculptures and drawings 1952 - Dusseldorf, 19th prize in Steel and Pig's Trotter (consolation prize, a light ballet by Piene). Wuppertal Kunstmuseum, Beuys: crucifix. Amsterdam, exhibition in honour of the Amsterdam-Rhine Canal. Nijmegen Kunstmuseum, Beuys: Sculpture 958 - Kranenburg, van der Grinten collection, Beuys: paintings 955 - End of the Kleve Artists' Union “Profile of the successor” 1956 - 1957 Beuys works in the fields 1957 - 1960 Recovery from work in the fields 961 - Beuys is appointed Professor of Sculpture at the Dusseldorf Academy of Art. Beuys adds two chapters to Ulysses at James Joyce's request 1962 - Beuys: The Earth Piano 1963 - Fluxus, Dusseldorf Academy of Art. On a warm July evening on the occasion of a lecture by Allan Kaprow in the Zwirner Gallery in Cologne's Kolumba churchyard, Beuys exhibits his warm fat. Joseph Beuys Fluxus stable exhibition in Haus van der Grinten, Kranenburg, Lower Rhine 1964 - Documenta III, sculptures, drawings. Beuys recommends that the Berlin Wall be elevated by 5 cm (better proportions!)

Brief reasoned biography of Joseph Beuys from 1921 to 1964 The family Joseph Beuys was born in Krefeld, Germany, on May 12th, 1921. He died at his home in Dusseldorf on January 23, 1986. He was the son of Hubert Beuys and Johanna Hùlsermann, and they lived in Kleve. The Beuys family descended from flour merchants and millers of the town of Geldern. His father opened a flour and fodder business in an old dairy in Rindern, near Kleve. As a child, he lived in modest conditions and received a rigid Catholic education from his family. The Place Its ancient history and strange traditions added to its peculiar geographical position at the bed of the Rhine and the Mass, in the midst of dunes and wamps, make Kleve one of the most fascinating areas of Germany. These particular surroundings had a great influence on Beuys' sensitivity and imagination when he was a child. His experiences and dreams as an adolescent, the memories of the landscape and of certain notorious figures, his acquaintances, the atypical constructions and the local mythology, the friendships, would all come into Joseph Beuys' future work.

948

The student and his cultural interests As a student, Beuys excelled in his varied scientific interests (he had set up an equipped laboratory at his parents' house) and next to these, he discovered a parallel fascination for the arts, in particular

for sculpture. In Kleve, he frequented the studio of sculptor Achilles Moortgat, close to the figures of Constantin Meunier and Georg Minne. But most especially, it was here that he came into contact with the photographic images of the artist he would later consider his real Teacher, Wilhelm Lehmbruck. Eleven days before his death, on May 12th 1986 Joseph Beuys received the Wilhelm Lehmbruck Prize from the city of Duisburg, where the artist made his last speech. Beuys also learned to play the piano and the cello. He dedicated time to the study of folklore and Nordic mythology, not because this was supported by the Nazi doctrine but rather as a reaction to his unilateral humanistic education. And even if the young Beuys was forced to participate in the Nùremberg march, he always felt he was free from ideological impositions and institutional systems like school or state.

From 1933 to 1940 he lived a period of intense intellectual and cultural impulse. His studies ranged from Kierkegaard to Nietzsche, from Wagner to Satie. He was greatly interested in the debate between classical and romantic literature. He read Schiller, Goethe, Hòlderlin, Novalis, the Nordic element, the thematic inventions of Edvard Munch, Hamsun and Scandinavian literature, which he knew in detail. After completing his studies at the Hindenburg High School of Kleve and following his remarkable scientific talent, he decided to begin a pre-medical course for a career as a pediatrician, although not very convinced of his choice, probably influenced by his main passion, the arts. The war Beuys was called to the army when he was 19 years old, in 1940. He was trained at Posen and at Erfurt, first as a radio operator and then as an on-board telegrapher. He was after trained as a bomber pilot in Kòniggratz in 1941, and sent the following year to the south of Russia, to Foggia in Southern Italy, to the Ukraine and to Crimea. He was stationed in Sevastopol. In 1943 his Ju-87 plane was hit by the Russian anti-aircraft artillery in Crimea, crashing during a snow storm near the border of the German front. He was found unconscious by some Tatars, who rescued him and took him to their felt tents. Here, they attended to his wounds with animal fat, and nourished him with milk and cheese. A German division later transferred him to the hospital. These two elements, felt and fat, would acquire a spiritual significance in his work, through a process that finds its development and its conquests at the very core of the artistic expression of Beuysian thought. In 1944, Beuys was sent to the northern Dutch front on the coast of the North Sea, to join the socalled Erdmann Phantom Division, a group of scarcely trained and poorly equipped parachutists. During this experience, Beuys was seriously injured for the fifth time since the beginning of the war. He was awarded the Gold Medal for the Wounded. Taken prisoner by English troops in 1945, he spent nine months in a prisoner of war camp at Cux haven. lt was only the following year that he was able to return to Kleve. He found his house bombed, and the Schwanenburg Tower that dominated the town, without its “golden swan. His childhood dreams shattered... Artistic interests These experiences reinforced his conviction to dedicate himself completely to art. In 1942, having obtained a study permit for the University of Posen, he had followed some lessons on the amoeba, given by a professor that had spent his entire life on a couple of unclear images of these simple cells. lt was a real shock for the artist... and this limited and narrow concept of specialization urged him towards a change of direction. He decided for art. He came into contact with the active Kleve artists. He was particularly helped by sculptor Waiter Brux and painter Hans Lamers, both in an artistic sense and for his admittance to the Kleve Artists' League, where he participated exhibiting his works from 1946 to 1955 without interruptions. During this time, he met the van der Grinten brothers, with whom he developed a strong and long friendship. He enrolled at the Dusseldorf Academy of Fine Arts in 1947, and assisted the lessons of Professor Enseling. He was to find out that narrow-mindedness and specialization were not exclusive property of science, and that artistic conceptions could be just as limited and rigid, especially regarding academic design and “art for art's sake." The artist In 1949 he enrolled in the university course of Ewald Mataré, a man known for his mystic faith in the unity of creation, and for his emphasis on the manual aspects of art; he allowed his students to work with common materials, stimulating their artistic sensibility.

949

From 1949 to 1952, Beuys produced his first plastic works, after the great number of drawings he had created from the very end of the war onwards. Recurrent themes in these works are religious subjects, animals, plants and human figures. le

During his last fifteen years in Italy, Beuys would pick these motifs up again in a sociological direction, in anthropological Defence of man and Safeguard of Nature. These works show a surprising parallelism between the formal organization, at times conventional, at times independent in its modernity, and traditional themes that present a powerful symbolism through the employment of unusual materials. The peculiar appearance of these works depends on the hypersensitive perceptions of the artist, that finds inspiration not so much in an optical and rational reality which is explainable, but rather from physical stimuli and indecipherable experiences. The most interesting work during this period is the Queen Bees series, of the early 1950s—the bees/honey theme would represent a pillar of Beuysian thought. Beuys makes natural substances protagonists, together with his own person, of the work of art.

Cultural impulses During these years, Beuys does not interrupt his studies and readings of literature, philosophy and culture. One of the figures that most influenced his formation was Rudolf Steiner, the founder of anthroposophy. The most important element he assimilates from Steiner‘ political ideas is undoubtedly the concept of self-administration and of the triple structure of state, economy and intellectual life. Another point he shares with Steiner is the necessity to have not only a rational but also a spiritual attitude towards reality. On the literary side, one of his favorites at this time was James Joyce, to whose Ulysses he added two chapters as sketches between 1958 and 1961. In 1951 he worked mainly upon request of private collectors. The van der Grinten brothers are the first to appreciate his work and begin their collection with the purchase of two prints and twenty drawings. From February 13 to March 15 of 1953, they open Beuys' first show in their Kranenburg home exhibiting drawings, woodcuts and all the artist's sculptures. In the same year, Beuys designed and made a cross for the grave of Joseph Koch's parents. In the 1950s, Beuys begins that operative attitude of criticism and evaluation of events in the historical, artistic, scientific and social surroundings of man, which was to characterize his personality during all his life. It is in this context that he deepens his interest in Paracelsus, Leonardo da Vinci and Galileo Galilei. Leonardo is a key figure as an artist, builder and naturalist and as a scholar in anatomy, botany, geology, optics and mechanics. Beuys was amazed at Leonardo's versatility, at his competence in contrasting fields, at his encyclopedic wisdom, from which he derived experience and experimentation. For Beuys, both Leonardo and Galilei, the founder of mathematical science that found great opposition from the official organs of the Church, faithful to the Aristotelic dogma, are the figures behind the future positivistic and bourgeois philosophies that would later bring about the Bourgeois Revolution. He entitled an exhibition at the van der Grintens' “Giocondology. After the completion of his studies at the Dusseldorf Academy in 1954, Beuys rented a studio in the neighborhood of Heerdt, in an old building that would later be demolished. He kept this atelier until 1959.

Crisis and change What followed this period was a long crisis of depression, characterized by strong doubts regarding his own work. He left Dusseldorf in 1956 with economic problems due to the medical cures he had to undergo. His close friends van der Grinten invited him to their home in the Kranenburg countryside, where thanks to his work in the fields, he gradually got well both physically and spiritually. This period of depression had long effects on the artist who had great difficulties in finding his way back to that serenity that would lead him near himself and man's existence. In many interviews he held after, Beuys underlined the importance of that painful moment for his future artistic pathway. He came out of this deep depression purified, with a new zest for existence and determined to face his life as a man andas an artist. On September 19th, he married Eva Wurmbach, professor of art history and daughter of a well-known zoologist. They had two children, Wenzel and Jessyka. The couple moved from Kleve to Dusseldorf in 1961, where Beuys was appointed Professor of Monu-

mental Sculpture at the Academy of Art. He had an exhibition at the Kleve State Museum Haus Koekkoek organized by the van der Grinten brothers, who, with the artist himself, wrote the text of his first published catalogue.

The Fluxus period Between 1962 and 1965 another important activity takes place: Beuys contacts the Fluxus movement

950

and participates in several performances, including some in the Academy where Beuys taught. Fluxus was an international movement that included all different kinds of people, from journalists to sculptors, musicians and philosophers. The major exponents of this varied group were George Maciunas, Nam June Paik, Charlotte Moorman, Wolf Vostell, Tvomas Schmit, Daniel Spoerri, John Cage, Robert Filliou, Bazon Brock, La Monte Young, and many others that participated off and on, which clearly shows the wide outlook of the movement. This experience gave Beuys the important chance of working with his own ideas in front of a wider public, and furthermore, put him in contact with a group of people that had committed themselves to break the boundaries between art and life, adopting the principle of inter-discipline that would mark his future work. Even if Beuys shared Fluxus' conviction that art must not be a prerogative of artists, he considered

that the group did not follow this principle in an articulate manner, and that a clear theoretical and political base was necessary to transmit this concept efficiently. Moreover, Beuys did not agree with Fluxus' use of the element of provocation of Dadaist origin that was an end in itself and lacked in originality. For Beuys, provocation should not produce an inconvenient moment of shock, but a stimulus of energy that widens the worn-out path of unilateral conscience, making it possible for the unconscious to appear once again and for indifference to become attention. The musical element of Fluxus greatly interested him, though not in a traditional sense. He collaborated with musicians such as Henning Christiansen, John Cage, Stockhausen and many others. Thus reaching a full maturity regarding Fluxus and a revindicated conceptual and expressive autonomy, Beuys inaugurated that season that brought him to international fame, becoming one of the most followed, hated, and adored characters on the international scene.

The Actions He began his performances in this period, which he called “actions” metaphors of art and of his philosophy. lt was on occasion of his first participation to a performance, organized by the artist himself on the 2nd and 3rd February of 1963, that Beuys presented his first two actions, Siberian Symphony, 1st movement and Composition for two Musicians. On July 18 he participated in an evening performance at the Zwirner Gallery of Cologne, where Allan Kaprow held an interesting conference. It was on that occasion that Beuys introduced the element of fat in his work, a material he would use regularly from then on. On September 14, he presented a successful action with Wolf Vostell at the Parnass Gallery of Wuppertal, 9 Nein De-Collagen (Happening). On October 11 he participated in the Demonstration fùr den kapitalistischen Realismus (Demonstration in favor of Capitalistic Realism) at the Mobelhaus in Dusseldorf with Konrad Lueg, Sigmar Polke and Gerhard Richter.

The public and success His first encounter with a large public took place in Kassel in 1964 at Documenta III, where he par ticipated with drawings and sculptures of the period between 1951 and 1956, among which we may mention Bienenkbnigin (Queen bees) and S4FG-S4UG. During the summer, he participated in the “Festival of New Art” that took place in Aachen in the evening of July 20, twentieth anniversary of the attempt on Hitler's life. His action was called Kukei, akopee-Nein! BraunKreuz, Fettecken, Modellfettecken, and it produced the violent reaction of right-wing students, who attacked his performance and the artist himself, who received a blow that made his nose bleed. The police was called and the situation went back to nor mal, although the demonstration program was put to an end. Beuys stayed to discuss matters with both left and right-wing students until very late, and found opposition from both sides. But this hostility itself helped to increase general awareness and that this was the right way to proceed. The press naturally reported what had happened, resulting, for better or for worse, in a further notoriety of the figure of Joseph Beuys.

951

Biography of Joseph Beuys from 1965 to 1986 1965

30 November Kunstakademie, Dùsseldorf-Action

5 June Parnass Gallery, Wuppertal, action ...und in uns .. unter uns .. landunter

1968

“66 - Programm

9 February

6 November Schmela Gallery, Diùsseldorf, action wie man dem toten Hasen die Bilder erklart 27 November —-31 December Schmela Gallery, Dùsseldorf, irgendein Strang”

exhibition

“Joseph

Beuys...

Wide White Space Gallery, Antwerp, Action Bi/dkopf-Bewegkopf (Eurasienstab), Parallelprozess 2, Der Grosse Generator 10 February — 5 march Wide White Space Gallery, Antwerp, exhibition “Zeichnungen Fettplastiken"” 23 March — 5 May Stedelijk van Abbe Museum, jen-objectentekeningen"”

1966 18-24 June Rene Block Gallery, Berlin, exhibition “mit Braunkreuz"

Eindhoven, exhibition “Schilderi-

28 April Gbttingen Centre, Action and discussion D.S.P.

7 July

Art Accademy, Dusseldorf, action /nfiltration Homogen fur Konzertfltgel, der grbsste Komponist der Gegenwart ist das Contergankind 9 September Avant Garde Festival, Central Park, New York /nfiltration Homogen fér Cello, concert of Charlotte Moorman

14-15 October 101 Gal ery, Copenhagen, Sibirischen Symphonie

Action

31 October Rene Block Gallery, Berlin, Sibirischen Symphonie 1963

15 May Volkshochschule, Dusseldorf, discussion Kunst und Politik 15 June — 5 August Haus der Kunst, Munich, exhibition Collection Karl Strbher 27 June — 6 October “Documenta IV” Kassel, exhibition, Raumplastik (Spatial Sculpture)

Eurasia und 34. Satz der

action

Eurasia,

32.

Satz

der

20 July -15 September Kunstlerhaus, Nuremberg, Exhibition Raum 563x491x563, Fettecken und auseinandergerissene Luftpumpen (Room 563 x491x563, Corners of fat and disassembled air pumps)

22 August — 6 October Kunstverein, Hamburg, Exhibition Karl Strbher Collection

4-23 November nachst St. Stephan Gallery,Vienna, drawings exhibition 15 December Schmela Gallery, Dusseldorf, action Manresa

20 — 29 September Wide White Space dtelefon"

1967

14 October

10 February —- 5 March nachst St. Stephan Gallery, Vienna, action Eurasienstab 82 min fluxorum organum

Franz

Dahlem

Gallery,

Darmstadt,

exhibition

exhibition

“Filz-TV

Er

“Art Intermedia” Cologne, Action Vakuum Masse Simultan = Eisenkiste halbiertes Kreuz Inhalt 20 Kg Fett 100 Luftpumpen 24 November Kunstacademie, Dusseldorf, by 9 fellow professors

20 March Franz Dahlem Gallery, Darmstadt, Action Hauptstrom Fluxus 21-28 March, “Fettraum”

Gallery, Antwerp

manifesto against Beuys signed

10 December Fluxus West Zone, Manifest

1969 22 June Dusseldorf, Beuys founds the German Student Party DSP

2-4 July nachst St . Stephan Gal lery-Vienna-Action min. fluxorum organum 13 September - 29 October Stadtisches Museum-Mbnchengladbach, prozess 1" 17 November Dusseldorf, Official ratification of the D.S.P.

952

Eurasienstab

exhibition

23 January Cream Cheese, Dusseldorf, Handaktion Eckenaktion

Action

Drama

“Stahltisch”/

82 29 January — 21 February Schmela Gallery, Dusseldorf, exhibition “Fond III”

‘Parallel

27 February

Berlin Academy, Rene Block Gallery, Berlin, Action /ch versuche dich freizulassen (machen) Konzertflugeljom (Bereichjom) 28 February-26 March participates in the “Blockade ‘69” Exhibition

27 March Stàdtisches Museum, Mbnchengladbach, Fluxus Konzert “oder sollten wir es verandern?"

6 November - 6 December im Taxispalais Gallery, Innsbruck, van der Grinten Collection exhibition

1 March — 14 April Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin, Karl Strbher Collection exhibition

24 November Art Academy, Dusseldorf, action the dead mouse 11 December — 31 January 1971-Anton Ulrich, Museum, Braunschweig, exhibition of drawings1946-1962

25 April - 8 June Kunsthalle, Dusseldorf, Karl Strbher Collection exhibition 7 May Dusseldorf, occupation of the Art Academy

1971 5 — 30 January nachst St. Stephan Gallery, Vienna, van der Grinten collection exhibition

12 May Dusseldorf, re-opening of Art Academy 16 May — 22 June Heidelberg “Intermedia '69” Concert

January Dusseldorf, Beuys makes the project for the Free Academy and the International Centre of Communication

29 — 30 May Theater Festival “Experimenta 3) Frankfurt, Action /phigenie/ Titus Andronicus 5 June — 31 August Kunstmuseum, Basel, van der Grinten Collection and Karl Strbher Collection exhibitions, Drawings 19461967 15 June — 13 July Kunstmuseum, Lucerne, Installation Fettraum

Group show

“Duùsseldorfer

Szene”

16 January — 28 February Museum of Modern Art, Stockholm, van der Grinten collection exhibition, drawings and objects 1937-1970 10 February Demonstration and manifesto of Beuys with artists Heerich and Klaus Steack for the Cologne Art Fair

Erwin

20 March — 25 April Von der Heydt, Museum, Wuppertal, van der Grinten collection exhibition. Drawings and objects

30 September — 12 October 6 April

Dusseldorf, “Prospect ‘69"

Zivilschutzraume, Basel, Action Celtic +—

16 November— 11 January 1970 Kunstmuseum, Basel, Karl Strbher Collection exhibition

12 May 50th birthday, Dusseldorf Art Academy, Action Raum 20

1970 24 January — 22 February Louisiana Museum, Copenhagen, nakel”

group

exhibition

“Taber

2 March Dusseldorf, Beuys founds the “Organization of non-voters, free referendum in Andreasstrasse 25"

24 April Hessischen, Landesmuseum, tion exhibition

1 May Museum Brandt

Darmstadt,

Karl Strbher Collec-

am Ostwall, Dortmund, meeting of Beuys with Willi

24 April - 12 September College of Art, Edinburgh, show “Strategy: get arts" 26 — 30 August College of Art, Edinburgh,

Richard

action

Demarco

Celtic

Gallery,

(Kinloch

group

Rannoch),

26 May — 6 June “Experimenta 47 Frankfurt, Wer ist noch an politischen Parteien interessiert?

1 June Andreasstrasse,

25, Dusseldorf, founds the Organization for

Direct Democracy through Referendum 5 June — 31 July Kunstverein, St Gallen, Drawings and objects 18 June Art Intermedia, etasche

Cologne,

June — August Beuys welcomes his course 16 August Lake Zuider swamps)

Lutz

near

Schirmer

street action

collection

Aktion

exhibition.

mit der Trag-

142 students that had not been admitted to

Ostende,

Aktion

im Moor

(Action

in the

Schottische Symphonie 12 October Kunstmarkt, Cologne, action Wir betreten den Kunstmarkt 6 November Eat Art Gallery, Dusseldorf, action Freitagsobjekt 1 a gebratene Fischgrate

17 August — 5 September Stedelijk van Abbe Museum, dere le mie montagne

Eindhoven, installation Voglio ve-

17 September — 2 October

Schmela Gallery, Disseldorf, Baraque d'Dull Odde. Celtic+--

953

8 October Documenta V, Kassel, Action Abschiedsaktion

4 October Dusseldorf Art Academy, Action /solation Unit 5 — 30 October Art Intermedia Gallery, Cologne, exhibition drawings and objects

30 October Galleria L'Attico, Rome, “Arena” exhibition and action Anarchars is Cloots

15 October Dùsseldorf, occupation Art Academy

1973

1 November Dusseldorf, foundation committee for a Free College 13 November Modern Art Agency, Naples, exhibition “The Cycle of His Work" (A cycle of works 130 Drawings and concepts1946-1971) 16 November - 15 December Thomas Gallery, Munich, exhibition drawings, temperas 14 December Rochus Club, Dusseldorf, Parteiendiktatur

Action

watercolours, 6 March Studio Marconi, Milan, “Arena” exhibition

Uberwindet

endlich

die

1972

Debate

12 January Ronald Feldman Gallery, New York, drawings exhibition 19471972 21 February Dusseldorf, first audition in front of Labour Court

18 December Kaiser Wilhelm Museum, Krefeld, debate “Kunst=Mensch"”

19 January Folkwang, Museum, Essen, Demokratischer Sozialismus

i. 10 October Beuys occupies with 54 students the Art Academy, dismissal

“Kunst=Mensch,"

Freier

26 — 27 February Tate Gallery and Whitechapel Gallery, London, information, action 13 March — 13 April Galleria Borgogna, Milan, exhibition works, drawings, multiples

28 March — 26 May Loehr Gallery, Frankfurt, Joseph Beuys exhibition, Gesammelte Editionen 1965-1972 (Editions 1965-72) 31 March- 13 May Kunstverein, Hannover, tion

“Kunst im politischen

Kampf”

exhibi-

11 April — 19 May Klein Gallery, Bonn, multiples Exhibition, books, catalogues

27 April Istitution of the Committee for the promotion of a free superior international school of creativity and interdisciplinary research 29 June — 26 July Grafikmeyer Gallery, Karlsruhe, multiples exhibition

31 March Karfreitagsaktion, Monchengladbach, action Friedensfeier

31 July Dusseldorf, second audition in Court Confirmation of the dismissal from Art Academy

21 April Centro d'Informazione Alternativo, Roma, debate “La Rivoluzione Siamo Noi”

20 August Richard Demarco exhibition

1 May Rene Block Gallery, Berlin, Exhibition “Joseph gen”

20 October Symbolic action, Beuys crosses the Rhine in a piroga

Beuys: Ausfe-

Gallery,

Edinburgh,

“Midday

to midnight”

27 October — 2 December Kunsthalle, Tubingen, Collection Karl Stréher Exhibition

12 - 17 May

Schmela Gallery, Diùsseldorf, exhibition of drawings November Villa Borghese, Rome, “Contemporanea” Beuys participates with Arena

10 June Harcus Krakow Gallery, Boston, exhibition 15 June Modern Art Gallery, Naples, action Vitex Agnus Castus

30 June — 8 October Documenta V, Kassel, presents Organisation Demokratie durch Volksabstimmung

fur

1974 8 February Dusseldorf, Beuys with Heinrich International University)

group

exhibition,

Boil creates the FI.U. (Free

direkte

30 June — 20 August Darmstadt, exhibition Karl Stroher Collection, drawings

13 March — 15 April Barna Gallery, Paris, Collection Multiples, Books Catalogues

Speck exhibition

1948-1972

7 April — 12 May 28 August Beginning of discussions between Beuys and Cultural Minister about the closed number of students at the Art Academy

954

Modern Art Museum, Oxford, “The secret block for a secret person in Ireland” exhibition

19 May 30 June Haus Lange Museum, Krefeld, drawings exhibition 1946-1971

1977 16 April — 26 June

23 — 25 May Rene Block Gallery, New York, / lite America and America likes Me action

Kunstmuseum, Basel, exhibition “The Secret Block for a Secret Person in Ireland”

3 October L.D.D Gallery, Pescara, political discussion Incontro con Beuys

24 June - 2 October Documenta VI, Kassel, exhibition “Freien internationalen Hochschule fùr Kreativitat und interdiszipliniire Forschung and V Honigpumpe am Arbeitsplatz"

30 October — 24 November Contemporary Art Institute, London, exhibition “Art into Society, Society into Art)" Direction of Energies to a New Society, Richtkràfte

3 August — 13 November

1974/75 From autumn 1974 to the beginning of 1975 he makes about 200 drawings inspired by the 1965 studies on Codice di Madrid of Leonardo Da Vinci. 1000 copies of a graphic book on these drawings are published

Munster, “Skulptur” group exhibition, installation Unschiitt/ Tallow 6 October — 11 December van Hedendaagse Kunst Museum, tion of drawings and watercolours

Citadelpark Ghent, exhibi-

13 October — 30 November Schellmann e Kluser Gallery, Munich, exhibition of drawings

1975

1978

January Trip to Africa with photographer Charles Wilp

January Kunstmuseum, Basel, exhibition “Hearth Il-Feuerstatte”

20 February Kassel Labour Court annuls the previous sentence

14 January Krefeld Thorn, Prikker Medal

23 May — 29 June Kunstverein, Friburg, drawings exhibition, objects, photos

20 January — 26 February Kunstverein, Braunschweig, multiples exhibition

Summer

12 February Borsa Merci Pescara, debate ‘Istituto per la Rinascita dell'Agricoltura”

Ronald Feldman erstatte

Gallery, New York, installation Hearth I, Feu-

Autumn Achberg, participates in the International Summer University

7 April Beuys wins law suit against Labour Chamber 8 November Beuys is willing to teach at the Applied Arts University of Vienna as a free professorship

1976 January Kunstmuseum,

Basel, Installation Hearth /, Feuerstatte

January Dusseldorf, He recognises the judgement of dismissal of Art Academy as valid 13 February — 6 March Kunstforum, Munich, installation Zeige dei ne Wunde

28 November Dusseldorf, Beuys leaves his job as Art Academy teacher but keeps his studio and title as Professor 23 December On newspaper Alternative”

Frankfurter Rundschau

manifesto

“Aufruf zur

1979 May Beuys candidates himself to German Parliament

8 May Beuys receives honoris causa degree from Nova Scotia Halifax College of Art and Design 18 July — I0 October 37th Venice Biennale,

15 February Vienna, Beuys refuses the appointment as regular teacher at the Applied Arts University

22 February — 10 March Nachst St. Stephan Gallery, Vienna Installation /Jungfrau Basisraum Nasse Vasche

exhibition “Strassenbahn, Haltestelle”

5 November - 2 January 1977 Kunstverein, Frankfurt, exhibition “mit,-neben-gegen/Joseph Beuys und die Kunstler der ehemaligen und jetzigen Beuys, Klasse December Hamburg, Lichtwark, Preis (Prize) Pescara, rural works Biological Plowing, Defence of Nature

22 April - 17 June Kiùnstmuseum, Lucerne, exhibition “Spuren in Italien" (Traces

in Italy) 18 May Hans Mayer Gallery, Dusseldorf, Beuys meets Andy Warhol May Beuys candidates himself for the European Parliament in the list of the Green Party

955

7 July Diisseldorf Art Academy, Action Fluxus, Joseph Beuys und Nam June Paik in memoriam of George Maciunas

17 April Modern Art Agency, Naples, action, installation Terremoto in

8 September Museum of Modern Art, Goslar, exhibition drawings and Objects. Beuys receives Goslar Art Prize

June Museum

8 October — 9 December XV Biennial of Sao Paulo, Brazil, exhibition Brazilian Fond

Palazzo

Boymans, Rotterdam, installation Grond

Summer Lenbachhaus,

Munich,

exhibition

“Beuys,

Arbeiten

aus

Munchener Sammlungen”

2 November — 2 January 1980 Salomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, anthological exhibition

31 October — 31 December RFA Embassy, Berlin, exhibition Ulbricht Collection of objects and multiples

November - January 1980 Boymanns von Benningen “Joseph Beuys Tekeningen”

Autumn Nijmegen, Collection

Museum,

Rotterdam,

exhibition

exhibition on the topic “Women”

van der Grinten

1982

1979/80

Pescara-Dùsseldorf-Pescara,

30 January - 20 March Durant, Dessert Gallery, Paris, exhibition “Letzter Raum? Last Space? Dernier Espace? 1964-1982”

Grassello

1980

3 April Rocca Paolina, Perugia, meeting Beuys-Burri

27 March — 12 May Anthony d'Offay Gal lery, London, exhibition “Letzter Raum? Last Space? Dernier Espace?1964-982” Ronald Feldman Gallery, New York, exhibition “Letzter Raum? Last Space? Dernier Espace? 1964-1982"

9 April Modern Art Agency, Napoli, meeting Beuys-Andy Warhol

May Paris, meeting with the Dalai Lama

30 May — 30 September 39 Venice Biennale, exhibition “Das Kapital Raum 1970-1977”

Spring, Nationalgalerie, Berlin, exhibition “450 Drawings of The Secret block for a Secret person in Ireland” Marx Collection, Strassenbahnhaltestele

March —- May Nazionalgalerie, Berlin, exhibition drawings

8 June — 20 July Kunsthalle, Bielefeld, drawings exhibition

19 June — 28 September Documenta VII, Kassel, action 7000 Eichen

21 June — 31 August “Area Europa 1968” Ghent, installation Wirtschaftswerte

10 August — 14 September Kunstmuseum,

10 June Bonn, peace demonstration on the banks of the Rhine Sonne statt Reagan

Dusseldorf, exhibition Ulbricht Collection Mul-

tiples 1965-1980 13 August — 10 September Anthony d'Offay Gallery, London, house of the Shaman 1964-1972

4- 8 August Australian National Gallery, Canberra, installation Stripes from the House of the Shaman 1964-1972 Exhibition Stripes from the

24 November Stockholm, Beuys is appointed Member of the Royal Academy of Fine Arts

29 November — 1 February 1981 Kunstverein, Bonn, “Zeichen und My then” exhibition “Vor dem Aufbruch aus Lager |” Stroher Collection sold at Frankfurt. The whole “Beuys Block” is purchased by friends and remains at the Darmstadt Museum 24 December Seychelles, Praslin, action Coconut and Coco de Mer Plantation

27 ottobre Bonn, conversation with the Dalai Lama

Autumn Abteiberg Museum, Monchengladbach, exhibition Block, Beuys from the Marx Collection of the Darmstadt Museum

October Nationalgalerie, Berlin, exhibition “Kunst wird Material” 12 — 24 November Hagen, participates in the Green Party Convention

1981 17 February - 8 March Museum of Modern

16 October — 16 January 1983 Martin Gropius, Bau, Berlin, exhibition “Zeitgeist” (Spirit of the times), group exhibition installation Werkstatt

Autumn

Art

of

Paris

Ville,

“Art

Allemagne

Museum

of Modern Art, New York OSTENDE, am Strand oder

Aujourd'hui” installation Grond

in den Dunen / ein kubusformiges Haus / darin / das Samurai,

7 April Palazzo Braschi, Rome, debate and installation Lotta continua

Echwert ist eine Blutwurst /SOCKEL

956

1983

tschein auf Hirsch 1958-1985”

February

18 October Paris FIAC., Gallery L.D.D., exhibition “Cotyledon Veneris;'" Bolognano 1985

Berlin, Beuys makes several bronze and aluminium objects at Herman Noack's from the Installation Werktat

20 April - 21 May Anthony d'Offay Gallery, London, drawings exhibition

3-4 December Centre George Pompidou, Paris, installation Fond V//2 and Infil tration homogen fùr Konzertflugel

21 May — l0 July Schmela Gallery, Dùsseldorf, installation Das Ende des 20 Jahrhunderts 29 May — 3 July Kettle‘s Yard Gallery, Cambridge, drawings exhibition

12 January Beuys receives the Wilhelm Lehmbruck Prize of the city of Duisburg

9 September - 25 October Anthony d'Offay Gallery, London Window, exhibition “Forms of the Sixties”

installation

Hinter

23 December Museo Capodimonte, Naples, installation Palazzo Regale

1986

27 July — 3 October Victoria and Albert Museum, London drawings exhibition

11 December — 15 January 1984 Konrad Fischer Gallery, Dusseldorf,

Ombelicus

23 January Josepf Beuys dies in his Dusseldorf home

dem

Knochen wird gezahlt, SCHMERZRAUM

1984 April Busch,

Reisinger

Museum,

Harvard

University,

Cambridge,

Massachussets, exhibition 140 drawings 13 May Bolognano, debate “Difesa della Natura, Paradise, Honorary citizenship

action Piantagione

2 June-2 July

Seibu Museum of Art, Tokyo, exhibition Ulbricht Collection and concert Coyote Ill Summer ROSC, Dublin, drawings exhibition

June - September Venice Biennale, about a bicycle?

“Quartet”

group exhibition, installation

/s it

6 July - 31 December Villa Campolieto, Ercolano, Installation Terremoto in Palazzo 8 September - 28 October Kunsthalle Tubingen, exhibition “Olfarben 1949 -1967" October Paris FIAC., Gallery L.D.D.,

exhibition Olivestone

18 December, Castello di Rivoli, Turin, “Ouverture” group exhibition, installation Olivestone

1985 2 March — 14 April Kunsthalle, Tubingen, exhibition project “7000 Eichem" 13- 24 April Room 3 Dusseldorf Art Academy, installation Nasse Wasche Jungfrau 8 October — 21 December Anthony d'Offay Gallery, London, istallation Plight Autumn, Royal Academy of Art, London, exhibition “Blitzsch'ag mit Lich-

957

It is through time that the individual questions himself about nature and the specificity ofhis fate and his own responsibilities (Joseph Beuys)

Vsenzia DeDurata Duri

P\ | \

Pierre Restany L'Eco del Futuro

|

Harald Szeemann Il Pensatore Selvaggio

È,

LoBetaenamo defe

I

np,

Sibiatoca dre sontmporanes coma

acmasonaa

Beto dartecontemporense

Val

i

LUCREZIA Dit DOMIZIO DURINI

Las (NCoi Dee

BEUYS. el barrei de felire

LLIBRES DEL SEGLE

Kdlitni CARTE SALIRETT

Un incontro oltre l'immagine

STONE OLIVESTONE OLIVE

Joscph Beuys y/c/sai Buby Durini TIIEATRICAL. VERSICI JosePti BEINS

Bn” JosePH BEUYS

STONE OLIVESTONE OLIVE

Joseph

Beuys

JosEPH BEUYS SCULPTOR OF SOULS OLIVESTONI

BUBY DURINI JOSEPH BEUYS

959

Remember Buby Durini

Buby Durini was born in Merano on November 16, 1924 and died tragically in the Indian Ocean, off Praslin Island, in the Seychelles, on 25 December 1994. Son of Baron Federico Carlo Durini of Milanese origin, a biologist, researcher, and expert on social and agrarian problems, for many years he used microphotography for his studies on maps of chromosomes. He also wrote an interesting publication on the temperature of butterflies in flight. Farmer and founder of the first Agrarian Cooperative and a school for the study of agricultural issues in Abruzzo, where he taught for years, Buby Durini was a fascinating, versatile and extremely cultured man, always at everyone's disposal. An ex trovert who was creative and open to many different cultural situations, he had a particular passion for sailing and photography. He only photographed what he loved: people, animals and plants. His relationship with Joseph Beuys was crucial to the way he captured the photographic image in the world of contemporary art. From that moment on, Buby Durini was a constant, assiduous, revolutionary presence at public and private, national and international artistic events. At the beginning of the 1970s, his home and studio at San Silvestro Colli, Pescara, became an extremely important cultural reference point in the history of Italian art. He was a passionate and dedicated photographer of artists including Alviani, Agnetti, Bagnoli, Boetti, Calzolari, Chiari, Chia, Clemente, Calia, Ceroli, De Dominicis, Festa, Job, Kounellis, Mattiacci, Mario and Marisa Merz, Ontani, Paolini, Pistoletto, Prini, Salvatori, Spalletti, Soskic, Rauschenberg, Vostell, Warhol, and many others. He became close friends with artists and collaborated with some of them to create interesting historic artworks and graphic works. Buby Durini was always fascinated by the present and his unusual, cultural, human images uniquely deal with the relationship between the man and the artist. His scientific and human affinities led to a heartfelt admiration of Beuys's work and ideas. He became his friend and conversation partner and followed the great German master to many countries throughout the world from the very day they first met in 1971 to his untimely death on January 23, 1986. He put all his land entirely at Beuys's disposal, as well as a farmhouse at Bolognano, where the German artist created the renowned Piantagione Paradise (Paradise Plantation) and his Studio. He also worked with Beuys on the famous Aratura Biologica (Biological Ploughing) in his San Silvestro Colli fields. At Beuys's explicit request he spent twenty-five days photographing both the public and private aspects of the artist's major retrospective held at the Guggenheim Museum, New York, in 1979. From over 3000 photos taken by Buby Durini Beuys chose some of them to create the two magnificent unique works, both entitled Guggenheim Museum, that have gone down in history. This is also how the 960

German master's other major photographic work, Difesa della Natura (Defence of Nature), came into being, consisting of 100 photos all signed and chosen by Beuys to set the seal on his final masterpiece. He invited the whole Beuys family to his house on Praslin Island in the Seychelles for Christmas 1980 and took part in the operation Diary of Seychelles with the German artist. From 1979 to 1980 he was totally involved in the work Grassello Pescara-DtisseldorfPescara. In 1984 he collaborated with Italo Tomassoni and with his wife Lucrezia De Domizio Durini on the book /ncontro con Beuys (Meeting with Beuys) that the German master had requested, in which over 200 photos narrate in images his very special “journey” with Beuys, focusing on how he deeply and actively shared Beuys's philosophy. That same year Beuys commissioned Buby Durini two atypical videos entitled A One Hour Drama, in which Durini stares at one of the famous oil bottles Difesa della Natura - Olflasche - and its twin bottle Vino F/.U. During the 1980s, Buby Durini became close friends with Pierre Restany and Harald Szeemann, and his photos led to two publications that are unique in intemational cultural history. His generosity and love of art led him and his wife to make major donations to many museums the world over, including Olivestone to the Kunsthaus in Zurich, Meeting with Beuys and FI.U. Auto to the Guggenheim Museum in New York, and F/.U. Flag to the Santa Monica Museum in Barcelona. Buby Durini's photos have been made into books, graphic works, posters, postcards and various types of publication, and many images have been used free of charge by magazines such as Vogue, Abitare, Domus, L'Espresso, ArtForum, and Capital, and newspapers such as The New York Times, Le Figaro, Le Monde, El Pais, Il Sole 24 Ore, Corriere della Sera, La Repubblica and many others. Lucrezia De Domizio Durini is the author of an interesting photographic book L’Obiettivo dell'Arte di Buby Durini, (The Lens of Buby Durini's Art) Charta, Milan 1996, to which Pierre Restany and Harald Szeemann contributed, as well as over six hundred personalities from the inter national world of culture who paid warm tributes to Buby Durini. Harald Szeemann drew sixty photographs from the book and curated the photographic exhibition that opened at the Milan Triennale and travelled to five major European Museums. The photographs were subseguently donated to the Kunsthaus in Zurich. The Archivio Storico Fotografico (Historical Photographic Archive) De Domizio Durini is one of the most representative archives of the last forty years of contemporary art. Sixteen years after her husband's death, Lucrezia De Domizio dedicated part of Beuys's famous Studio at the Bolognano Paradise Plantation—Remember Buby Durini—to an exhibition of more than two thousand pictures of friends, in Art and beyond Art.

961

Biography of Lucrezia De Domizio Durini Lucrezia De Domizio Durini (b. 1936) has been, for over forty years, a unique figure in the contemporary art and cultural world as a cultural worker, journalist, writer, curator, publisher and patron. She began in the late sixties by opening the L.D. Studio, a home/gallery designed by Getulio Alvani, Ettore Spalletti and Mario Ceroli in the town of Pescara, where she held exhibitions of Burri, Fontana, Capogrossi, Rotella and Pistoletto, and provided an outlet for American Pop Art and International constructivism. After marrying Baron Giuseppe Durini of Bolognano in the seventies, the San Silvestro Colli Villa near Pesaro became a meeting place for leading figures in the contemporary art world, attracting top conceptual and Arte Povera artists to her home as artists and as friends: Mario and Marisa Merz, Kounellis, Calzolari, Bagnoli, Bassiri, Vettor Pisani, Paolini, Prini, Mattiacci, Boetti, Ontani, De Dominicis, Fabro, Agnetti, Job, Russo, Giuli, Salvadori, Clemente, Chia, Tieri and a host of others. Her ongoing salon also attracted critics Bonito Oliva, Celant, Tomassoni, Trini, Menna, Corà, Salerno, Gatt, Izzo and Marisa Vescovo. Soon afterwards, she converted a barn at Pescara's old Bourbon fort into a space for events and non-traditional art happenings. Lucrezia De Domizio Durini met German artist Joseph Beuys on a ferry to Capri in 1971, and then followed his career through many countries around the globe. This casual meeting culminated in the first Encounter with Beuys debate in 1974. With the Pescara gallery space and Villa di San Silvestro Colli providing the backdrop for some of the most significant events in aesthetic inquiry over the last thirty years, Joseph Beuys's works became the leitmotiv of Lucrezia De Domizio's life. She wholeheartedly espoused Beuyss entire philosophy and became a groundbreaking activist and Italian art historian, travelling to Venice, Kassel, Bolognano, Tokyo, Naples, Veert, Paris, London, Dusseldorf, the Seychelles, New York, Oxford, Edinburgh, Munich and Rome ... the venues which link her to Joseph Beuys, one of the most important figures in post-war global art history. The talented German artist chose Bolognano as his second home: Beuys set up his Studio in the mountain village and created the famous Paradise Plantation. On May 13, 1984 Beuys received an honorary citizenship. It was here that he planted the First Oak, following the “7000 caks" he planted in Kassel; it was here that he conducted the final debate (before his untimely death) Defence of Nature, in which he tackled the topic of creativity. Intellectuals such as Harald Szeemann, Pierre Restany and Thomas Messer (and since 1990 Antonio d'Avossa) have all been active participants. Since Joseph Beuys's death on January 23, 1986, Lucrezia De Domizio Durini has dedicated herself to promoting Beuys's thought around the world through debates, panels, conferences, publications, conventions, dissertations, essays and exhibitions held at international museum venues, including the “Operacio Difesa della Natura” retrospective at 962

the Santa Monica Museum in Barcelona (promoted by the Generalitat de Catalunya in 1993), the “Diary of Seychelles” exhibition, “Difesa della Natura" promoted by the Perugia Province administration at Rocca Paolina in 1996, Piazza Beuys in 1999, the first World Convention in Budapest in 2000, the “Joseph Beuys L'immagine dell'Umanità” exhibition at the Mart Museum, Trento in 2001, the Republic of San Marino stamp in homage to the German artist, and // Bosco Sacro di Beuys in Gibellina, as well as a host of international events. Her twenty-six books on Beuys include // Cappello di Feltro, translated into seven languages and selected as a textbook by academies and universities in Italy and abroad, Olivestone, and L’Immagine dell'Umanità e la Spiritualità di Joseph Beuys. An art collector and publisher, chairperson of the Italian Free International University, elevated to the rank of Chevalier of the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in 1993 by J. Lang in Paris, a member of the Tribunale dell'Ambiente, Lucrezia De Domizio Durini's name is associated with donations of Joseph Beuys' artworks to institutes in Italy including the Uffizi Gallery of Florence, the Venice University of Architecture, and the Mart Museum of Rovereto; outside Italy, Olivestone to the Kunsthaus in Zurich, the Mitterrand Foundation in Paris, the Guggenheim Museum of New York, Sarajevo Museum, the San Marino Museum, Zagreb Museum and the Santa Monica Museum of Barcelona. In 1990, she founded “|| Clavicembalo” non-profit cultural association in homage to Joseph Beuys. From 1987 to 2006, Lucrezia De Domizio Durini lived and worked in Milan in a loft at the Caproni warehouse, which soon became a venue for international meetings and the home of Cultural Intereommunication magazine RISK arte oggi, which Lucrezia De Domizio Durini founded in 1990 and continues to direct today. She has been the subject of numerous articles in Le Monde, Figaro, EI Pais, The New York Times, Corriere della Sera, La Repubblica, Il Sole 24 ore, Domus, Abitare, Ottagono, Il Giornale dell'Arte, Artforum, Vogue and Milano Finanza, and in many other international weekly and monthly magazines. Lucrezia De Domizio Durini is curator of the Italian department at the Sarajevo Museum. On May 13, 1999, working closely with award-winning international curator Harald Szeemann, Lucrezia De Domizio Durini inaugurated Piazza Joseph Beuys in Bolognano. Using Beuysian concepts, the Piazza was built as a phenomenological unicum in world art history. She has refurbished the historic Palazzo Durini residence in Bolognano and turned it into an exclusive one-off project, /a casa di Lucrezia, to celebrate a life and events unique in Italy. To mark Joseph Beuys' 80th birthday, in collaboration with the Republic of San Marino stamp office, she presented the Difesa della Natura Stamp to commemorate the German artist. Lucrezia De Domizio Durini has worked with internationally renowned architects Jean Nouvel, Mario Botta and Renzo Piano; with poets such as Sanguinetti; and with philosophers including Sgalambro, Donà and Cacciari. Music has always played a major role in Lucrezia De Domizio 963

Durini's work through installations and concerts with the likes of John Cage, Emanuel Dimas de Melo Pimenta, Giorgio Gaslini, Umberto Petrin, Leonello Taraballa, amd Merce Cunningham (in preparation for a major work). Lucrezia De Domizio Durini worked for Edizioni Charta in Milan for six years, managing Charta/Risk, a special series of publications on cultural intercommunication. She currently oversees the “Il Clavicembalo” and “| linguaggi della cultura” series of publications for Silvana Editoriale publishing house in Milano. She is the author of 56 art books. Her theatrical career includes directing at the Gobetti Theatre in Turin (M. Bagnoli, Mario Merz, G. Paolini and R. Salvadori, 1977), at the Quirino Theatre in Rome for Michelangelo Pistoletto (1980), and providing the story for groundbreaking plays The Thought Takes Shape and The Felt Hat Joseph Beuys, A Life Told for Aldo Roda at the Out-Off Theatre in Milan and the Scandicci Theatre in Florence. Lucrezia De Domizio Durini has curated major exhibitions in prestigious museums around the world. She is a unique figure on the international cultural scene. Her approach embodies a broadened vision of art, in which art is an integral part of life. She works with humanitarian associations and is involved in longdistance child sponsorship. In 2001, she was awarded the title of Knight of the Order of Merit of the Italian Republic by President of the Republic Hon. Carlo Azeglio Ciampi, and the Cultural Merit Medal by the city of Sarajevo. She was named Woman of the Year by the American Biographical Institute in 2005, and received the Silver Plaque as a patron of the Italian State Archives in 2006. She became an Honorary Member of the Kunsthaus in Zurich in 2009; In the summer of 2003 and 2008, she staged the Free International Forum in Bolognano, the world's first Cultural Forum (a ten-year project) in which different languages, disciplines and social, humanitarian and environmental issues actively and dynamically come together to serve an enlarged conception of Art. A mould-breaking permanent installation, Beyond Museums Protecting Art, has been ongoing since 2001 in Bolognano, near Pesaro in Italy. The impetus behind the project is to environmentally and culturally redevelop the entire village by turning Bolognano into a location where homes and working environments are wholly transformed by the works of “silent artists” as the expression of a new pedagogical paradigm for benefitting from art. Bolognano communicates with mankind and nature through lit-up Shop windows by night, and through ongoing signals from the Paradise Plantation designed by international artists. The whole endeavour has been conceived to blaze a trail towards the Future of Art and the Future of Society. Works include Mario Bottinelli Mondandon's habitable sculpture Casacielo, a unique work in the history of contemporary art; and Stefano Soddu's bronze i/ Portale at the Chiesa Santa Maria Entroterra (a family chapel donated to the diocese), though the authorities are yet to give authorization for the installation and the work is currently behind one of the Vetrine displays. 964

The Second Free International Forum took place in June 2006. The road into Bolognano features a backlit blow-up of Beuys with the 30-metrehigh legend Defence of Nature and Renzo Tieri's Beuysian Four Cardinal Points. Lucrezia De Domizio Durini designed an underground construction at Joseph Beuys' “Piantagione Paradise” in Bolognano, a hypogeum that she has named “The Place of Nature” Servizi e Magazzini della Piantagione Paradise (Facilities and Warehouses for the Paradise Plantation), dedicated to Harald Szeemann, is a project that embodies Joseph Beuys' conceptual imprint for protecting the environment and relations between art and the burning cultural issues of our day. “The Place of Nature” is an International Study and Research Centre intended to expand the place of art in teaching. Inaugurated on 25 September 2005, the Centre's 1,000 square metre venue has been entirely designed and funded by Lucrezia de Domizio Durini.

She has recently published three major works with Silvana Editoriale of Milan: Pierre Restany. L'Eco del Futuro; Harald Szeemann. Il Pensatore Selvaggio and Il Luogo della Natura. Servizi e Magazzini della Piantagione Paradise. Giorgio Gaslini's Lo Sciamano del Jazz. As ever, Lucrezia De Domizio Durini has conceived and sponsored these projects without funding from any public or private bodies. Invitedto be one of the Additional Exhibitions atthe 52ndVenice Biennale 2007, Lucrezia De Domizio Durini curated the one-off event “Joseph Beuys. Defence of Nature. The Living Sculpture Kassel 1977 Venice 2007 — Homage to Harald Szeemann — a 100 day ongoing conference. Thirty years on, she returns to the humanitarian, environmental, economic, social and cultural concerns that she debated with Beuys at Documenta VI in Kassel and at the FI.U., in an attempt to renew mankind and human society. Invited at the 53nd Venice Biennale 2009, Lucrezia De Domizio Durini curated the one-off event “Is it possible? Nature and Economy Together? The Work of Viantonio Russo — artist and economist;” with conferences, concerts andperformances. Lucrezia De Domizio Durini is an independent cultural worker for whom Art, Culture and humanitarian and environmental issues are the prime movers of her life. She likes to refer to herself as a Collector of human connections. She has been living and working in Bolognano since March 2006. She presently edits the “The Living Sculpture Collection" series for Electa.

965

VIDEO Seyehello

cr cGrNIE

I

ovocenzi

le» Ton ho

Ì

A

è

n

.

È

4 Ì

i i

4 ix

}

N

iL

'

’

i

sz

Fi

zzÈ 4 R; 3

z 3GI

Y

(

Rm, %

rica

KG El

È

è

Vii

Vi

4,

9

té,

GRANITO

È

x ,

=

5

ì

z z p-

e

IARMITTA

Meg

TAVOLA

2

do,

& ye

rica

5

LIVHALNYOI9

“

LS

n

Coconut

Lay

*,

‘

Lo

he lo Fior)

ill

4

STTTIMIAIS OLOA TIA

n STRISCIONE DIFESA DELLA NATURA

GIGANTOGRAMIE VMOOLNVI ALA Di AR N VITRO ren ESITO 4 suono RIal vsana NIWLIVA

Yor SEYCHE

Opera Vaica NATURA DELLA PIVESA Patografica TE

Mi

450

2î

LLEy

;

Si LE

i

È 1i

F

sî

Ì

w

-

SVECCIATOIO-

i x

$ x

E.

i

DI

s5 las

sa I:

\ $È2 E a °

| \

{

«=

5

tortofiafaParigion

|iyf |el

>sA

5E

see

s} 21

foro Beuys varie at8x24

3

ÈÈ

i

È

=

NESia

> Ra

CRI ss

9

.

sore

ff i

foto Reuys varte nIAx24

20

TIRO

foto varie 18124

Èî

(2 cicanTOGRAmA Hero onaTRIPALA

È;

i

oc

pat rn

RAMO OLIVO

e Banda

Allestimento Bottiglie Olio FIL

-SAMMLUNG »

5 ©)

Vendita in Beneficenza TAVOLO

con Manifesti,

Libri, Grafiebe,

Cartolinedi

Lavori fermati enumerati di Artisti in OmaggioalM Vrom Bolognano to Zarig

\

È

OLIVESTONE

e disegni relativi

nai

z =

DOCUMENTI

SCULT

À

ALLESTIMENTO

MOSTRA

Joseph Beuys DIFISA

DELLA

KUNSTHAUS

NATURA

Collezione Privata Lucrezia De Domizio Durini

FOTO J.BEUYS Foto BUBY

DURINI

Arch.Storico De Domizio Dorini

MULTIPLI

TEN Vin,

EDIZIONI

— pre

4:50 foto

Beuys varie alBa24

eni vino

È SCULTURA VINO 100cartonivin» FOTO Scultura Vioa

This publication was released in three different languages: Italian, German and English on the occasion of the exhibition

Joseph Beuys. Difesa della Natura

Editorial Coordination Cristina Garbagna Graphic Coordination Angelo Galiotto

Kunsthaus Zurich, May 13 - August 14, 2011 Curated by Lucrezia De Domizio Durini Tobia Bezzola Coordination Franziska Lentzsch

Insurance /Transports Karin Marti

Editing Valeria Perenze

Page Layout Giorgio Gardel Technical Coordination Andrea Panozzo

Quality Control Giancarlo Berti

Restoration Hanspeter Marty and team Advertising Bjorn Quellenberg and Kristin Steiner

Translations Sylvia Adrian Notini Jeremy Scott

Sponsoring Monique Spaeti Documentation Cécile Brunner Technical Installation Robert Brandli, Robert Sulzer and their team

www.electaweb.com

© J. Beuys by SIAE 2011

© 2011 by Lucrezia De Domizio by ZUrcher Kunstgesellschaft / Kunsthaus Zùrich by Mondadori Electa S.p.A., Milan All rights reserved

| i This volume was printed for Mondadori Electa S.p.A. at Mondadori Printing S.p.A., Verona 2011

The royalties from this publication will go to Associazione Culturale Onlus “Il Clavicembalo”

DATE DUE

‘

da

î

"

Ù

fa

v n

s

Î

4

È

Ù

x

Li

I Peo

‘

a

Ì

} Pra

0

Ù

À

.

nti

È

Po

Se

n

b

a

*

1

Pa,

la

”

e

SG La

PO)

NS,

Ù

4

pet e

E Ù

n

Ù

Di

i v

7

he

laale

ea a

Ù

ta i

x Pea

; n

po

ad

n

1

ni 34

eri

i 0

“

This publication — through the voice of Beuys himself and the precious collaboration of the illustrious figures who shared the humanitarian ideals

of the great

German master — reveals the continuing vitality

of Beuys's notion of Living Sculpture. For the Future of Art

For the Future of Humanity

JIN BN

| | | 85

8837

Il

i