Radical Teaching, Direct Democracy and Social Plastic

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Soziale Plastik: Materialien zu Joseph Beuys, 1976. Archivo Lafuente

Joseph Beuys (Krefeld, 1921-Düsseldorf, 1986) embodies, perhaps unwillingly, some of the major dichotomies paired by art during the 20th century. A shaman and a clown, a torchbearer at dawn and a messenger at dusk, Beuys the man and his body of work present a three-fold challenge that is not always easy for contemporary spectators to grasp: how they should handle artists’ provocation; what temptations might lead them to cynicism; to what extent disorder reinvents the public sphere.

Beuys occupies a fundamental place in the dominant accounts concerning art of the 20th century. Even so, or perhaps as a consequence, his work is still interpreted on the basis of extreme dichotomies stoked by certain historiocal approaches and by those stereotypes of a reactionary nature that read contemporary artistic output in terms of decay.

Whether Beuys is viewed as a shaman or as a clown, as a torchbearer for the art to come or as a messenger telling of the supposed decline of the arts, it is necessary today to restore to their rightful place the various frameworks that shaped his career, among them, his period in history, the era that extends from the late 1950s to the mid-1980s; his cultural context, in which German institutions took over trusteeship of the public sphere; and his own evolution as an artist, the path—often ignored—that led Beuys from a relatively traditional sculptural practice linked to northern European and even figurative primitivism during the first half of the 1950s, to his association with the Fluxus movement and his later acclamation by the media.

This exhibition considers three different aspects that are crucial to understanding Beuys’ career.

The “Radical Teaching” section focuses on Beuys’s activity in the realm of art education, in which he advocated a veritable dismantling of the codes, methodologies and ways of thinking of standard teaching.

The “Direct Democracy” section explores the construction of structures of citizens’ counter-power through which the role of artists in the public sphere could be expanded.

Finally, “Social Art” looks at Beuys’ formulation of a new symbolic space for the production and use of the work of art, raising its relevance outside the legitimizing protocols of the theorizing elites, and beyond the formalisms and the ready-made of Duchamp and the Dadaists.

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