JOSEPH BEUYS

1. JOSEPH BEUYS

2. Who Was Joseph Beuys • German sculptor, painter, installation artist, art theorist and art pedagogue, and is considered one of the most influential European performance artists. • Known as clown, shaman, and creative force whose artistry respected no boundary lines, the public welcomed this alert distraction from the immense shadow of World War II. Beuys answered a need of the population, waking up from the shock of its economic social and cultural lethargy following the war, and showed a way to rise from the ashes that was as fun as it was holistic and spiritually challenging. • "Art is," he said, "a genuinely human medium for revolutionary change in the sense of completing the transformation from a sick world to a healthy one." (Beuys quoted in Quartetto, exhibition catalog, ArnoldoMondadoriEditore, 1984, Milano, p. 106) • Beuys's art objects and performances weren't/aren't about entertaining an audience, though in their confluence of wacky happenings with strange substances, in their novelty, they must have at least entertained the most unwilling observer. Beuys wanted to awaken the populace, shake one out of the routines, the acceptable rigors one can pass through life with unobservant of the disparities and conflicts all around. "...I not only want to stimulate people, I want to provoke them." (Bastian, Heines and JeannotSimmen, "Interview with Joseph Beuys," in the catalog exhibition, Joseph Beuys, Drawings, Victoria and Albert Museum, Westerham Press, 1983, no folio)

3. How to Explain Pictures to a Dead Hare How to Explain Pictures to a Dead Hare - 1965

4. Description & Analysis In this performance piece, Beuys could be viewed - his head and face covered in honey and gold leaf - through a gallery's windows, a slab of iron tied to one boot, a felt pad to the other, as the artist cradled a dead hare. As though carrying out a strange music (if not some macabre bedtime story), Beuys frequently whispered things to the animal carcass about his own drawings hanging on the walls around him. Beuys would periodically vary the bleak rhythm of this scenario by walking around the cramped space, one footstep muffled by the felt, the other amplified by the iron. Every item in the room - a wilting fir tree, the honey, the felt, and the fifty-dollars-worth of gold leaf - was chosen specifically for both its symbolic potential as well as its literal significance: honey for life, gold for wealth, hare as death, metal as conductor of invisible energies, felt as protection, and so forth. As for most of his subsequent installations and performance work, Beuys had created a new visual syntax not only for himself, but for all conceptual art that might follow him. MATERIALS USED: Gold leaf, honey, dead hare, felt pad, iron, fir tree, miscellaneous drawings and clothing items

5. CAPRI BATTERY - 1985

6. Description & Analysis Considered to be one of his last great works before he died, Beuys created over 200 multiples of “Lemon Light/Capri Battery” in 1985. The yellow light bulb is plugged into a fresh lemon, from where it gets its energy, emitting a dim yellow glow. In this piece, Beuys is calling into question the ecological balance of civilization, the principle behind which is an ecologically sound energy source. Beuys completed the work on the island of Capri, hence the name, while he was recovering from an illness, and the light’s lemon yellow color reflects this jovial atmosphere and bright Mediterranean sun MATERIALS USED: Light bulb, plug socket, lemon

7. Websites Researched • http://www.artchive.com/artchive/B/beuys.html • http://www.nationalgalleries.org/collection/artists-a-z/B/2762/artistName/Joseph%20Beuys/recordId/4142