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Joseph Heinrich Beuys was a German artist, teacher, performance artist, and art theorist whose work reflected concepts of humanism and sociology. With Heinrich Böll, Johannes Stüttgen, Caroline Tisdall, Robert McDowell, and Enrico Wolleb, Beuys created the Free International University for Creativity & Interdisciplinary Research (FIU). Through his talks and performances, he also formed The Party f…
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culture · German artist and art theorist (1921–1986) · sculptor · choreographer · painter · university teacher · illustrator · photographer · conceptual artist · performance artist · printmaker · draftsperson · also Joseph Beuys, J. Beuys, Jozef Bojs, Iosef Boĭs, Josef Beuys, Joseph Beyus
Born 12 May 1921 · Died 23 January 1986 · Q153965
60 published statements · 0 followers
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It was thus a strategic stage to use the shaman's character but, subsequently, I gave scientific lectures. Also, at times, on one hand, I was a kind of modern scientific analyst, on the other hand, in the actions, I had a synthetic existence as shaman. This strategy aimed at creating in people an agitation for instigating questions rather than for conveying a complete and perfect structure. It was a kind of psychoanalysis with all the problems of energy and culture.
The sound of the piano is trapped inside the felt skin. In the normal sense a piano is an instrument used to produce sound. When not in use it is silent, but still has a sound potential. Here no sound is possible and the piano is condemned to silence.
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“It was thus a strategic stage to use the shaman's character but, subsequently, I gave scientific lectures. Also, at times, on one hand, I was a kind of modern scientific analyst, on the other hand, in the actions, I had a synthetic existence as shaman. This strategy aimed at creating in people an agitation for instigating questions rather than for conveying a complete and perfect structure. It was a kind of psychoanalysis with all the problems of energy and culture.”
“The sound of the piano is trapped inside the felt skin. In the normal sense a piano is an instrument used to produce sound. When not in use it is silent, but still has a sound potential. Here no sound is possible and the piano is condemned to silence.”
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“was like that of a carrier wave, attempting to switch off my own species”
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Artnet: Joseph Beuys Turned Groceries Into Artworks. Conserving Them Is Complicated
The Art Newspaper: Joseph Beuys was ambitious, ‘perhaps to the point of megalomania’, says a new book about the German artist
Wall Street Journal: ‘Joseph Beuys: In Defense of Nature’ Review: The Broad’s Overgrown Overview
Observer: One Fine Show: “Joseph Beuys, In Defense of Nature” at The Broad
Hyperallergic: Joseph Beuys Predicted the “Manosphere”
Los Angeles Times: 100 native trees will be planted in Elysian Park for the Broad’s Joseph Beuys exhibition
Wall Street Journal: Joseph Beuys Made Art From the Mundane
Hyperallergic: A New Documentary Reveals the Living, Breathing Joseph Beuys
Artnet: What Can Joseph Beuys’s Mythic Boxing Match Teach Today’s Activist Artists?
Joseph Beuys and Richard Demarco, Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art and Summerhall Arts Centre, July–October, Edinburgh ("Joseph Beuys & Richard Demarco – Beuys in Scotland")
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Mitchell-Innes & Nash, New York, ("Joseph Beuys – Multiples from Schlegollection")
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Dale Eisinger of Complex ranked I Like America and America Likes Me the second greatest work of performance art ever, after Pandrogeny by Genesis P-Orridge
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The Broad Art Foundation in Los Angeles acquired 570 multiples by Beuys, including a Filzanzug and a Schlitten, thereby becoming the most complete collection of Beuys works in the United States and among the largest coll
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Joseph Beuys retrospective, Moderne Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, France
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A year after the artist's death, has yet to be completed, as it will take about 300 years for the 7,000 oak trees to become the great forest imagined by Joseph Beuys
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1992, and 1998, and has planted trees and basalt columns in New York City as part of his 7,000 Oaks, echoing his planting of 7,000 oaks each with a basalt stone, a project begun in 1982 for Documenta 7 in Kassel, Germany
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Awarded Wilhelm Lehmbruck Award (1986).
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Died 1986-01-23.
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“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.”
Was awarded honorary citizenship of Bolognano (Pescara)
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Beuys visited Japan and showed various works, including installations and performances, while also holding discussions with students and giving lectures
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Was invited to create a work for documenta 7
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Was invited to participate in the seventh edition of the major exhibition “documenta,” which takes place every five years in the German city of Kassel
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Beuys recorded a music video for a song he had written entitled "Sonne statt Reagan" which translates to "Sun, not Rain/Reagan", an anti-Reagan political piece that included some German puns and reinforced some key messa
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Alongside Neapolitan photographer Mimmo Jodice, he reached the ruins of Gibellina, in the province of Trapani, which had been destroyed by the 1968 earthquake; on that occasion, he conceived the environmental work Sacro
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Beuys took part in a meeting with Alberto Burri at the Rocca Paolina in Perugia, curated by Italo Tomassoni
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Building on scepticism voiced by Belgian artist Marcel Broodthaers, who in a 1972 Open Letter had compared Beuys to Wagner, art historian Benjamin Buchloh (who was teaching at Staatliche Kunstakademie, just like Beuys) l
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Edinburgh Festival Beuys was at the FIU exhibition and performed Jimmy Boyle Days (the name of the blackboards he used in public discussions), and where he went on a hunger strike as a public protest and led with others
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Awarded Goslarer Kaiserring (1979).
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In London in 1978 and Edinburgh in 1980, as well as in many other iterations
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Awarded Lichtwark Prize (1976).
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Beuys performed In Defence of the Innocent at the Demarco Gallery where he stood for the imprisoned gangster and sculptor Jimmy Boyle in a manner associating Boyle with the coyote
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In Edinburgh, Beuys worked with Buckminster Fuller in Demarco's 'Black & White Oil Conference', where Beuys talked of 'The Energy Plan of the Western Man' using blackboards in open discussion with audiences at Demarco's
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327 drawings, the majority of which were made during the late 1940s and 1950s, were collected into a group entitled The Secret Block for a Secret Person in Ireland (a reference to Joyce), and exhibited in Oxford, Edinbur
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With the performance Vitex Agnus Castus in Naples, of combining female and male elements and evoking much else, and extended further with I Like America and America Likes Me to have a performance dialogue with the origin
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Invited by Lucrezia De Domizio and Buby Durini, and returned there many times in the following years, making it his second home
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A large collection of Beuys's work formed under the artist's own aegis, the Ströher Collection, was installed in the Hessisches Landesmuseum in Darmstadt, which remains the most important public collection of his work
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Beuys created ARENA for Demarco as a retrospective of his art up to that time, showed his installation The Pack (Beuys) and performed Celtic Kinloch Rannoch with Henning Christiansen and Johannes Stüttgen in support, see
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Beuys added to his famous statement – "teaching is my greatest work of art" – that "the rest is the waste product, a demonstration
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Was included in Harald Szeemann's groundbreaking exhibition When Attitudes Become Form at the Kunsthalle Bern
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The 'Beuys Block', a group of first works, was purchased by the collector Karl Ströher in Darmstadt (now part of the Hessisches Landesmuseum)
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When he participated in a festival at the Technical College Aachen which coincided with the 20th anniversary of an assassination attempt on Adolf Hitler
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Beuys broadcast a different message (from the Second German Television Studio) a different message: Das Schweigen von Marcel Duchamp wird überbewertet ('The silence of Marcel Duchamp is overrated')
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Beuys befriended his Düsseldorf colleague Nam June Paik, a member of the Fluxus movement
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Beuys was appointed professor of monumental sculpture at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf
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Beuys married Eva Wurmbach
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Beuys participated in an international competition for an Auschwitz-Birkenau memorial
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Beuys began a cycle of drawings related to Joyce's Ulysses
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Artistic self-doubt and material impoverishment led to a physical and psychological crisis, and Beuys entered a period of serious depression
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Graduating at age 32 as master student from Mataré's class
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Mataré accepted Beuys into his master class where he shared a studio with Erwin Heerich, that he kept until 1954, a year after graduation
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Beuys, along with other artists (including Hann Trier), founded the group 'Donnerstag-Gesellschaft' (Thursday Group)
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Who had rejoined the academy the previous year, after having been banned by the Nazis in 1939
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Beuys was stationed in the Crimea and was a member of various combat bomber units
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Beuys volunteered for the Luftwaffe, and began training as an aircraft radio operator under the tutelage of Heinz Sielmann in Posen, Poland (now Poznań)
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Beuys was a member of the Hitler Youth; the organization at that time included a large majority of German children and adolescents, and later that year membership became compulsory
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Born 1921-05-12.
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