One of the Artists - Annotated Bibliography Example

Josef Beuys The emergence of conceptualism in the 1960s enabled conceptual artists to focus on phenomenological and epistemological areas of inquirythat mostly deal with extending the boundaries of art by inserting art into real life. This kind of artistic school is often produced outside of the postmodern mainstream and within more religion-infused cultures than contemporary Western culture and is openly engaged in censored content. Several important characteristics link the works of conceptual artists are: the use of nonart materials for their social or metaphorical implications and for their spiritual “charge”; a preference for site-specific or temporary installations that often involve performance; and the reenactment or adaptation of ritual practice and symbolism based on ancient cultures. (Perlmutter & Koppman 1999, p. 106) One of the artists who form the basis for this investigation is Joseph Beuys. Life There are unarguably few postwar artists who could match Joseph work as an artist in regard to the range of experimentation that he displayed not just in a single artistic field but in an immense repertoire of sculptures, installations and performance pieces. This is even more highlighted by his engagement with the intellectual, social, and political events of his day. Dawn Permutter and Debra Koppman (1999) wrote that only until recently the work of Beuys stood as the sole spiritual stronghold in conceptual art with others following his example of seeking out the philosophies and traditions of ancient cultures, when humankind lived in unison with nature and valued communal life as a guide for their art. (p. 106) Joseph Beuys was born in 1921 in Krefeld, Germany. He was conscripted to the German army where he suffered injuries in a plane crash. By the end of the war, he started to pursue his interest in art after getting disillusioned by his study of natural science. He studied at the Dusseldorf Art Academy with the sculptor Edward Matare from 1947 to 1951. After this education, he struggled for years as an artist and suffered constant bouts of depression in the process. During this period, he remained an isolated figure because the Constructivist and Expressionist design were still very much valid. It was not until the 1960s and 1970s when his work will be recognized – from teaching as a professor of Monumental Sculpture at the Dusseldorf Academy; working with the Fluxus movement, whose experimental, interventionist ‘events’ had much in common with his own strategies; and, concerns to the start of a life-long collaboration with Nam June Paik. (Beuys & Harlan 2004, p. i) At present, readings of Beuys’ art that are biographical in nature have become dominant both in the USA and in Europe. A number of publications, for instance, present chronologies of events, exhibitions and dates in the artist’s life. These chronologies are in addition to the complex and important document/fiction that Beuys presented as his life course/work course and which capitulated the basis for his art practice from 1950s to 1972. Art and Politics Starting in the 1960s open processes and direct energies were starting to be explored that is why Beuys’ art began to make its presence felt. By this time Beuys had already created a highly distinctive oevre ranging from infinitely subtle drawings that explore vital processes and structures to sculptures informed by an utterly untimely symbolism of material and energy. According to Ruhrberg et al. (2000), this style was highlighted by the artist’s addition of happenings, environments, and, after lengthy preparations, Beuys’ utopian vision of ‘social sculpture’. (p. 553) This is the reason why Boyce is known separately as and teacher, politician, theoretician and preacher. What is interesting is that these functions became integrated within an extended concept of art, “with all the forms of expression based upon the quest for the ‘whole person’ in which nature, myth, science, intuition and reason become one again.” (p. 533) In the artist’s work, it is easy to recognize that nothing is pure coincidence or surrealistic chance. Ruhrberg et al. emphasized that this idea is particularly pronounced in the fact that Beuys’ projects stand up to the most stringent formal criteria and convey complex ideas in a structured way. (p. 556) For instance, the piece Show Your Wounds (1976) explored the concept of death; the Capital Room on the other hand portrayed revolution and successfully displayed the reaction of all the senses. We also have the 1977 Honey-Pump at the Workplace (see fig. 1) which interpreted the circulation of cultural and thermal energies between art and life. Time and time again Beuys sought to explore the fate of the earth, true to his visionary self-conception. The rocks in his sculpture At the End of the 20th Century tried to predict some scenario akin to doom as it sprawled as if some form of field of ruin or a cemetery with its sense of dread countered only be a tiny implantation of grease. In exploring what Beuys tried to talk about in this piece, one can say that he speaks of destruction not as a given that one can simply observe, but a counter-image process. Here we are made to witness an extensive and horrific form of destruction in the world conveyed as an experience fundamental to humanity. Beuys repeatedly referred to this theme in many of his lectures, particularly in terms of the development of science in the 19th century, explaining both the natural world and the human being in physical or biological perspectives, and which ultimately developed a materialistic world view that enveloped every area of our life. (Beuys & Harlan, p. 106) Fig. 1 Beuys advocated the role of the engaged artist to a new level as he attacked the hierarchical structures of bourgeois institutions. For instance, through his opus, Aktionen, he championed democracy as well as individual self-determination. His proselytizing tendencies, stressed Gotz Adriani (1979), culminated in a call to subume every dimension of human experience under a paradigm of creativity, a position encapsulated in his well-known claim that he did “not want to carry art into politics, but make politics into art.” (p. 277) Beuys’ art was inextricably tied to politics as he labored to make sense of his own nationhood and the world at large after the horrors and the world loathing for Nazism. One can understand this in the artist’s attempts opening up a space for his political perspectives in the media-dominated world. It has been said that Beuys’ aesthetic conservatism is logically complemented by his political retrograde, not to say reactionary, attitudes. Both, writes Benjamin Buchloh, are inscribed into a seemingly progressive and radical humanitarian program of aesthetics and social evolution that is why abstract universality of his vision has its equivalent in the privatistic and deeply subjectivist nature of his actual work. (p. 60) Any attempt, therefore, on his side to join the two aspects results in curious sectarianism. Critiques The majority of Beuys’ critics identified him as part of a larger neo-avant-garde tendency to appropriate the radical strategies of early twentieth-century movements such as Dada and Surrealism for thoroughly conventional purposes. According to Gail Finney (2006), these projects betray their aesthetic predecessors by reinforcing rather than challenging the institutional parameters of art and the status of the artwork as a fetishized commodity. Buchloh went on to propose that Beuys is a naïve utopian harboring political ideas that fulfill the criteria of the totalitarian in art just as they were propounded by Italian Futurism on the eve of European fascism. (2001, p. 211) According to him, Beuy has ostensibly left-wing program that is based on an abstraction of universal subjectivity that could lead only to a kind of aesthetics of self-destruction. To this day, this critique by Buchloh would remain extremely influential and is frequently cited as the reason why Beuys had never attained the widespread popularity in America – the kind that he enjoys in Europe. Indeed, there is much in Beuys’ pronouncements that may strike us as anachronistic and out of step with the agenda of contemporary cultural criticism. Also, in discussing Beuys’ politics, Finney argued, there is the fact that his primary aim was to construct an aesthetic religion that featured himself as privileged visionary or shaman. (p. 69) However, one should be reminded that the liberating potential of his projects has not been full understood, either by Beuys’ supporters or his critics. Furthermore, even those who consider his style sectarian, pseudo-religious, irrational or even fascist, find themselves confronted with a sense of monumentality which took is rooted in his studies with Matare and his beginnings in the field of decorative art. Perhaps the most striking aspect of Beuys’ contribution to 1960s European art was his conviction that the diverse range of experiments taking place needed to be unwritten by a theory, a recognizable, underlying structure, with a clearly marked goal. In the end, we have the very words of Beuys, quoted by Adriani, in his attempt to elaborate on his quest for a fundamental form capable of grounding the social sciences and the humanities in its entirety: The totalized concept of art, that is the principle that I wanted to express with the material, which in the end refers to everything, to all forms in the world. And not only to artistic forms, but also to social forms or legal forms or economic forms, or agricultural problems, or to other formal and educational problems. All questions of man can be only a question of form, and that is the totalized concept of art. (Adriani 1979, p. 283) Beuys believed that everyman is an artist and that he continuously emphasized on the creative potential of man. He explained this through using language as a model. Beuys speaks of his art, particularly the expanded concept of art not as a theory but as “a way of proceeding.” (Beuys 1986, p. 34) His customary emphasis on the totalizing nature of human art is at least momentarily complemented by a decision to accord language primacy as the original power of form-giving. He elaborates: I go back to the sentence: in the beginning was the word. The word is a form. That is the evolutionary principle as such.” (Beuys, p. 34) When Beuys died in 1986, he died an alchemist, social visionary and artist. He left behind not only extensive or large-scale installations and site works, provocative multiples and small objects, thousands of drawings (many on blackboards developed as part of permanent conference/dialogue actions), documented social sculpture forums about energy, new money forms and direct democracy, but above all a methodology, a theory of sculpture. (Beuys & Harlan, p. i) These numerous projects and articles contain unexplored seed and are significant basis for that are invaluable to the new – the next – generations of ecological, social process and interdisciplinary practitioners. References Beuys, J. and Harlan, V. (2004). What is Art?: Conversation with Joseph Beuys. Clairview Books. Beuys, J. (1986). "In Conversation with Friedhelm Mennekes." In In Memoriam Joseph Beuys: Obituaries, Essays, Speeches. trans. Timothy Nevill. Inter Nationes, Bonn. 29-34. Buchloh, B. (2003). Neo-avantgarde and Culture Industry: Essays on European and American Art from 1955 to 1975. MIT Press. Buchloh, B. (2001). "Beuys: The Twilight of the Idol, Preliminary Notes for a Critique." In Joseph Beuys: Mapping the Legacy, ed. Gene Ray, 199-211. Distributed Art Press, New York. Finney, G. (2006). Visual Culture in Twentieth-Century Germany: Text as Spectacle. Indiana University Press. Perlmutter, D. and Koppman, D. (1999). Reclaiming the Spiritual in Art: Contemporary Cross-Cultural Perspectives. SUNY Press. Ruhrberg, K., Schneckenburger, M., Walther, I., Honnef, K., and Fricke, C. (2000). Art of the 20th Century. Taschen. Read More