What is Art?: Conversation with Joseph Beuys

Joseph Beuys · Volker Harlan

Dec 2012 · CLAIRVIEW BOOKS

About this ebook

Joseph Beuys’s work continues to influence and inspire practitioners and thinkers all over the world, in areas from organizational learning, direct democracy and new money forms to new art pedagogies and ecological art practices. Here, in dialogue with Volker Harlan - a close colleague, whose own work also revolves around understandings of substance and sacrament that are central to Beuys - the deeper motivations and insights underlying ‘social sculpture’, Beuys’s expanded conception of art, are illuminated. His profound reflections, complemented with insightful essays by Volker Harlan, give a sense of the interconnectedness between all life forms, and the foundations of a path towards an ecologically sustainable future. This volume features over 40 b/w illustrations.

About the author

JOSEPH BEUYS - alchemist, social visionary and artist - was born in 1921 in Germany. In 1961 he became Professor of Monumental Sculpture at the Dusseldorf Academy, but was expelled in 1972. Following his first gallery 'action' in 1965, 'Teaching Paintings to a Dead Hare', his international reputation grew. In 1979 he was honoured with a major retrospective at the Guggenheim Museum, New York. He died in 1986, just after receiving the prestigious Lehmbruck Prize. Beuys left behind him not only numerous large-scale installations and site-works, hundreds of provocative multiples and small objects, thousands of drawings, documented social sculpture forums about energy, new money forms and direct democracy, but above all a methodology and ideas like 'parallel process' and 'social sculpture'.