Joseph Beuys bei der Eröffnung der 4. documenta, 1968, © VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn, 2008, Foto: Abisag Tüllmann.
Joseph Beuys, Multiple Überwindet endlich die Parteiendiktatur, 1972, mit einem Foto der gleichnamigen Aktion im Grafenberger Wald, Düsseldorf, 14. Dezember 1971, © VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn, 2008.
Joseph Beuys während der Aktion Titus / Iphigenie im Rahmen der experimenta 3, Theater am TurmFrankfurt am Main, 29. Mai 1969, © VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn, 2008, Foto: Abisag Tüllmann.
Joseph Beuys, Multiple Capri-Batterie, 1985, Glühlampe mit Steckerfassung, Zitrone; in Holzkiste, 8 x 11 x 6 cm, © VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn, 2008.
Joseph Beuys, Das Schweigen von Marcel Duchamp wird überwertet, o. J. (1964), Papier, Ölfarbe, Tinte, Filz, Schokolade, Fotografie, 157 x 178 x 2 cm, Museum Schloss Moyland, Sammlung van der Grinten, © VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn, 2008.
La rivoluzione siamo Noi, 1972, Lichtdruck/Polyesterfolie, 191 x 102 cm, © bpk / Hamburger Kunsthalle, Kupferstichkabinett / Elke Walford. |
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Hamburger Bahnhof
Invalidenstraße 50/51
+49-0-30-3978-3412
Berlin
Cult of the Artist: Beuys.
We Are the Revolution
October 3, 2008-
January 25, 2009
In the second half of the 20th century, the world of art found in Joseph Beuys (1921-1986) a figure whose universal aspirations and ingenious visual imagery lunged out deep into the European history of ideas. No other artist in the 20th century applied his thoughts on the relations between art and society in such a complex way as Joseph Beuys.
Twenty years after the last major exhibition of his work in Germany, and following major exhibitions in Zurich, Paris and London, the exhibition BEUYS. We are the Revolution gives shape to this large expanse of his ideas. For the first time ever the context of his work will be outlined in great detail by way of various documents, writings, films and photographs. The presentation is grounded in the open work and above all on Beuys himself: Beuys the artist, Beuys the thinker, Beuys the individual. Chapters of works by Beuys from the collection of Erich Marx as well as the abundance of audiovisual material from the Joseph Beuys Media Archives will be shown in vivid, dialogical juxtaposition with key works, seldom on loan, from right across Europe. Furthermore, to mark the exhibition, the prestigious STEIDL publishers will be producing a publication packed with pictures, which, analogous to the exhibition, is to set itself the challenge of trying to make sense of Beuys in his entirety as a singular phenomenon in an artistic biography.
It was during the 1960s that Beuys formulated his central theoretical concepts concerning the social, cultural and political function and potential of art. Indebted to Romantic writers such as Novalis and Schiller, Beuys was motivated by a utopian belief in the power of universal human creativity and was confident in the potential for art to bring about revolutionary change. This translated into Beuys’s formulation of the concept of Social Sculpture, in which society as a whole was to be regarded as one great work of art (the Wagnerian Gesamtkunstwerk) to which each person can contribute creatively (perhaps Beuys’s most famous phrase, borrowed from Novalis, is ‘Everyone is an artist’). In the video Willoughby SHARP, Joseph Beuys, Public Dialogues (1974/120 min), a record of Beuy's first major public discussion in the U.S., Beuys elaborates three principles: Freedom, Democracy, and Socialism, saying that each of them depends on the other two in order to be meaningful. In 1973, Beuys wrote:
“Only on condition of a radical widening of definitions will it be possible for art and activities related to art [to] provide evidence that art is now the only evolutionary-revolutionary power. Only art is capable of dismantling the repressive effects of a senile social system that continues to totter along the deathline: to dismantle in order to build ‘A SOCIAL ORGANISM AS A WORK OF ART’… EVERY HUMAN BEING IS AN ARTIST who — from his state of freedom — the position of freedom that he experiences at first-hand — learns to determine the other positions of the TOTAL ART WORK OF THE FUTURE SOCIAL ORDER.”
Beuys manifested these ideas most notoriously in abolishing entry requirements to his Düsseldorf class. Throughout the late 1960s this renegade policy caused great institutional friction, which came to a head in October 1972, when Beuys was eventually dismissed from his post. The dismissal, which Beuys would not accept, produced a wave of protests from students, artists and critics. Although now bereft of an institutional position, Beuys continued a voracious schedule of public lectures and discussions, as well as becoming increasingly active in German politics. Amongst other things, Beuys founded (or co-founded) the following political organisations: German Student Party (1967), Organization for Direct Democracy Through Referendum (1971), and Free International University for Creativity and Interdisciplinary Research (1974). Beuys became a pacifist, was a vocal opponent of nuclear weapons and campaigned strenuously for environmental causes (indeed, he was elected a Green Party candidate for the European Parliament). Beuys also continued to make sculptures, installations, drawings and performances until his death in 1986. In 1982, for example, he planted 7,000 oak trees in Kassel, Germany, for Documenta 7 (7,000 Oaks). The first and only major retrospective of Beuys work to be organised in Beuys’s lifetime opened at the Guggenheim Museum in New York in 1979. The exhibition has been described as a “lightning rod for American criticism,” eliciting as it did some powerful and polemical responses. He was a vigorous and original proponent of Rudolf Steiner's social ideas.
The artist is the core mythical figure of the Western world. For thousands of years now he has come to be worshiped in many guises: as Prometheus, prophet, genius or superman. No other cult figure reveals the history of the European spirit with such force as a drama centering on the eternal conflict between reality and madness, heaven and hell, fate and free will.
In 2008, the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin (National Museums in Berlin) will be making this cult of the artist their major theme for the year. The primary location for the exhibition series is the National Gallery, founded in 1876 as a national place of worship to honour the masters of international contemporary art. In autumn 2008, the gallery takes centre stage for the great ‘ring' of cult artists; the Old National Gallery — unsurpassed temple of the arts — will transform itself into a Walhalla of the German artistic myths of the 19th century. With its exhibitions The Klee Universe and Jeff Koons' Celebration, the New National Gallery will celebrate the apotheosis of the artist in the 20th century, positing him between the metaphysical and pop. Meanwhile Hamburger Bahnhof puts the spotlight on the two most important prophetical artists of the recent past, Andy Warhol and Joseph Beuys, but not without offering a space to the deconstruction of the myth of the artist by showcasing such figures as Martin Kippenberger and Co.
The intellectual heart of the exhibition series will be Immortal! The Cult of the Artist in the exhibition halls at Kulturforum Potsdamer Platz, from where we will be given the chance to take a sweeping look at the role of the artist in all cultures and across all epochs. The exhibition will pay equal attention to images of the artist from outside Europe as well as to European myths of the artist - from the declaration of the artist as an organon of god in the Middle Ages right up to the cult of genius and the readiness in the 20th and 21th centuries to perceive the artist with the same aura as a prophet and messiah.
In the Egyptian Museum on the Museum Island this journey through the ages reaches far beyond the confines of the history of Western culture and stretches as far back to the birth of the cult of the artist in the workshops of Thutmosis, creator of Nefertiti, who we shall be honouring as Berlin's still most beautiful woman. In the special exhibition ‘Giacometti, the Egyptian' the distant past and present day are brought together in timeless proximity to each other, thus closing our ring of cult artists, for whom, with a total of ten exhibitions, the National Museums in Berlin are preparing a grand stage in the autumn of 2008. |
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