Page 23 - Studio International - September 1971

A Joseph Beuys Joseph Beuys refuses to be categorized as a interpretation of Nature came to satisfy him less
and less. As a wartime pilot he crashed in a
prophet. In his view the words 'message' and
Primer `prophet' stem from a past stage of consciousness snowstorm in the Crimea, and survived in
defiance of all the laws of probability when the
—they have an atavistic ring to them, because
they implicitly refer to a belief in divinely cockpit of his aircraft buried itself in the ground.
Georg Jappe ordained revelation. Beuys sees himself as an He was nursed back to health by Tartars in a
educator, in search of ways of influencing human hide tent. There is no doubt that this was a key
development. These ways are drawn, in his experience; but certainly not in the nineteenth-
words, from 'normal thinking, a faculty which century sense of art as the interpretation of
has developed in the course of past cultural autobiography. For Beuys, the artist's
phases'. experiences provide only the viewpoint which
Joseph Beuys was born in 1921 in Kleve on determines the way he casts his eye. Beuys
the lower Rhine. On 12 May this year he became aware that the experience of death, and
celebrated his fiftieth birthday. Before the war hence the central issues of existence, could not be
he studied science, and in particular biology. comprehended scientifically. So after the war he
But the exclusively positivist scientific went to the Kunstakademie in Düsseldorf and

2

z Joseph Beuys studied sculpture. (His professor was Ewald
Hauptstrom 1967 Mataré, who later became well known for his
2 Joseph Beuys bronze doors on Cologne Cathedral.)
The Hare After art school Beuys withdrew for ten years
to a hermit-like existence in a Lower Rhineland
retreat with foxes and hares for company (the
hare was to be a decisive emblem of life in his
work). In 1961 he was recalled to the
Kunstakademie to succeed Ewald Mataré as
professor of sculpture. In 1964 he attracted
attention—and annoyed many people, including,
the then President of the Federal Republic—
with a Happening in Aachen which, apart from
the title 20 July 1944, had nothing whatever in
common with received ideas about the German
resistance to Hitler. But it was only in 1968, after
a comprehensive exhibition of his work at
Monchengladbach and Eindhoven, a
contribution to the fourth Documenta, and a
scandal at the Kunstakademie in which his
fellow-professors declared his ideas to be
unacceptable and irresponsible, that the public
at large began to take notice of him. The
founding of a German Student Party (which
Beuys declared to be his 'greatest sculpture',
while referring to most of the members as
animals); the declaration that art and life were
identical; the statement that it is more important

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