Joseph Beuys
Joseph Beuys used record covers and posters to convey political messages. His concept of a "social sculpture" as a total work of art calls for creative participation in society and politics. Beuys himself was involved in the founding of the Green Party (today Bündnis 90/Die Grünen) and ran for the European Parliament. Among other things, his strong reference to Rudolf Steiner's theses is increasingly being critically questioned today.
A wide variety of materials found their way into his artistic work in order to convey or archive his critical performatively developed contents. The record as a carrier of a voice or mood is combined here with paper as a carrier of content and temporal location. The records presented here are an example of his collaging and alienating way of working with different contents. On "Beuys laughs", for example, he had a 20-minute recording of his laughter edited together, which was recorded on numerous tapes of his lectures and workshops during his trip to America.
Joseph Beuys
Biography
The action artist and sculptor Joseph Beuys was born in Krefeld in 1921. From 1946 to 1952 he studied painting and sculpture at the Düsseldorf Art Academy and was later a master student of Ewald Mataré. From 1961 to 1972 he held a professorship at the Düsseldorf Art Academy, from which he was dismissed because of his commitment to the admission of all students without numerus clausus and because of the repeated occupation of the secretariat. Behind this was his understanding of an "expanded concept of art". Beuys dealt with questions of humanism, social philosophy and anthroposophy. He died in Düsseldorf in 1086. In 1979, the New York Guggenheim Museum showed a retrospective of his work.
