Page 42 - Studio International - September 1970

Four pages Joseph Beuys has emerged as probably the with a room to himself at the 4th Documenta
major figure in post-war German art. 'Born in Kassel.
Joseph Beuys in Kleve' in 1921 (though his mother was in His work is being shown for the first time in
Krefeld at the time) he was a central figure in
Great Britain in an exhibition entitled
the Fluxus group activities in the Ruhr in the STRATEGY : GET ARTS> , Contempor-
late '50s and early '60s — an early European ary Art from Dusseldorf' organised by the
version of performance art, happenings, etc. Richard Demarco Gallery, Edinburgh, at the
His position since 1961 as professor of sculp- Edinburgh College of Art until September 12.
ture at the Art Academy in Düsseldorf, where
he studied after the war, has had much to do `To be a teacher is my greatest work of art.
with the emergence of Düsseldorf as a lively The rest is the waste product, a demonstra-
centre of action and attention in contempor- tion. If you want to explain yourself you must
ary art. present something tangible. But after a while
Beuys' official' biography lists a large num- this has only the function of a historic docu-
ber of autobiographical exhibitions, beginning ment. Objects aren't very important for me
with the 'exhibition of a wound patched with anymore. I want to get to the origin of matter,
tape, Kleve,' in 1921, and including 'exhibi- to the thought behind it. Thought, speech,
tion of an airport, Erfurt North,' in 1940, and communication— and not only in the socialist
an exhibition of 'Warm Fat during a warm sense of the word— are all expressions of the
July evening while Allan Kaprow lectured' free human being.'—Joseph Beuys (in an
in Cologne in 1963. But Beuys has tended to interview, August 1969).
avoid more conventional exhibition situa-
tions; his work has thus had very little show-
ing outside Düsseldorf and has begun only
very recently to attract the international
critical attention it deserves. In 1968 his en-
tire retrospective of 300 works at the Stedelijk Text opposite
van Abbe Museum in Eindhoven was pur- Fold-out for exhibition 'Josef Beuys: Zeichnungen—
Objekte', at art intermedia, Cologne, December 1968—
chased by the German collector Karl January 1969. Per Kirkeby's text is to be interpreted in
Stroher. In the same year he was represented a figurative but not an unreal sense.