Joseph Beuys Quotes
May 12, 1921 – January 23, 1986
More Joseph Beuys Quotes
I work in the field of art, and you know how during a period of Marxist ideology, fewer people are inclined to believe in the power of the culture as a whole: they believe in the revolutionary potential of economics, class struggle theory...Therefore it’s time to show that art means the power of creativity, and it’s time to define art in a larger way, to include science and religion too.
Joseph Beuys— "I am searching for field character" (1973, p. 31)
A total work of art is only possible in the context of the whole of society. Everyone will be a necessary co- creator of a social architecture, and, so long as anyone cannot participate, the ideal form of democracy has not beenreached.Whether peopleare artists, assemblers of machines or nurses, it is a matter of participating in the whole.
Joseph Beuys— 1972 From an interview with G Jappe (translated by J Wheelwright), in Studio International, vol.184, no.950, Dec. Quoted in C Harrison and P Wood (eds) Art in Theory1900-1990 (1992).
After I am dead I would like people to say: 'Beuys understood the historical situation. He altered the course of events'. I hope in the right direction.
Joseph Beuys— p. 92 (Interview with Willoughby Sharp, 1969)
I am interested in the creativity of the criminal attitude because I recognize in it the existence of a special condition of crazy creativity. A creativity without morals fired only by the energy of freedom and the rejection of all codes and laws. For freedom rejects the dictated roles of the law and of the imposed order and for this reason is isolated.
Joseph Beuys— Quoted in Germano Celant, Beuys, tracce in Italia, Amelio, 1978
My objects are to be seen as stimulants for the transformation 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 FROMS – how we mold our thoughts or SPOKEN FORMS – how we shape our thoughts into words or SOCIAL SCULPTURE – how we mold and shape the world in which we live: SCULPTURE AS AN EVOLUTIONARY PROCESS; EVERYONE AN ARTIST. (1979)
Joseph Beuys— Introduction, as quoted in Energy Plan for the Western man - Joseph Beuys in America, compiled by Carin Kuoni, Four Walls Eight Windows, New York, 1993, p. 19
This is the concept of art that carries within itself not only the revolutionizing of the historic bourgeois concept of knowledge (materialism, positivism), but also of religious activity. EVERY HUMAN BEING IS AN ARTIST who – from his state of freedom – the position of freedom that he experience at firsthand – learns to determine the other positions in the TOTAL ARTWORK OF THE FUTURE SOCIAL ORDER.. ..THE FIFTH INTERNATIONAL IS BORN.
Joseph Beuys— p. 22 (I am searching for field character, 1973)
I describe it ( the new aesthetics) ‘radically’: I say aesthetics = human being. That is a radical formula. I set the idea of aesthetics directly in the context of human existence, and then I have the whole problem in the hand, them I have not a special problem, I have a “holography” (reacting on a former suggestion of the public as a slight joke, fh) I don’t know exactly what a holography is.. (1973)
Joseph Beuys— p. 34 (I am searching for field character, 1973)
I Think art is the only political power, the only revolutionary power , the only evolutionary power, the only power to free humankind form all repression. I say not that art has already realized this, on the contrary, and because it has not, it has to be developed as a weapon, at first there are radical levels, then you can speak about special details. (1973)
Joseph Beuys— p. 34 (I am searching for field character, 1973)
The ego must be developed, not for its own sake, but because it is needed by society. If you are only interested in self-realization then you cannot make a good painting. To do this you have to have thought about forming, and about how ideas of forming stem from history.
Joseph Beuys— p. 12 (Joseph Beuys at the School of the Art Institute of Chigago, 1974)
- You can make these energies very clear if you enter another kingdom that people have forgotten, and where vast powers survive as big personalities. And when I try to speak with the spiritual existences of this totality of animals, the question arises of whether one could not speak with these higher existences too, with these deities and elemental spirits.. ..The spirit of the coyote is so mighty that the human being cannot understand what it is, or what it can do for humankind in the future.
Joseph Beuys— p. 142 (Interviews with Caroline Tisdall, 1974 and 1978)
I wished to go completely outside and to make a symbolic start for my enterprise of regenerating the life of human kind within the body of society and to prepare a positive future in this context... I can see such a use for the future as representing the really progressive character of the idea of understanding art when it is related to the life of humankind within the social body in the future.
Joseph Beuys— In; Studio International. Vol. 195, (9181), p. 46
I believe that planting these oaks is necessary not only in biospheric terms, that is to say, in the context of matter and ecology, but in that it will raise ecological consciousness-raise it increasingly, in the course of the years to come, because we shall never stop planting.
Joseph Beuys— Joseph Beuys (1982), cited in: Jeffrey Kastner, ?Brian Wallis (1998), Land and environmental art. p. 164 : about his 7,000 Oaks (see image).
The only hope I had was when (in his youth)I saw one day a photograph of a sculpture by Wilhelm Lehmbruck, a German sculptor of expressionistic style. This was perhaps the only example, Lehmbruck, between my sixteenth to nineteenth years in which I saw a possibility for art to be principally of interest to innovate some things, instead of writing a very boring, naturalistic repetition of what is already done by nature.
Joseph Beuys— p. 65 (Interview with Kate Horsefield, 1980)
Let's finally try to talk about a system that transforms all the social organism into a work of art, in which the entire process of work is included, whether it's work by Goya or Kounellis or mine, as well as agriculture, the sciences, or education or technology, something in which the principle of production and consumption really takes on a form of quality. One must not only transform the creation of paintings or sculptures, but the entire social form. It's a gigantic program.
Joseph Beuys— Lucrezia De Domizio Durini, ?Joseph Beuys (1997) The felt hat: Joseph Beuys, a life told. p. 201
I think the tree is an element of regeneration which in itself is a concept of time. The oak is especially so because it is a slowly growing tree with a kind of really solid heartwood. It has always been a form of sculpture, a symbol for this planet.
Joseph Beuys— Joseph Beuys (1982), cited in: Claudia Mesch (2013) Art and Politics: A Small History of Art for Social Change Since 1945. p. 160
