Joseph Beuys /1921 - 1986 ~ ~
Born: Kleve, Germany
Worked: Düsseldorf , Germany
original text : http://www.artandculture.com/arts/artist?artistId=89
A provocateur par excellence, Joseph Beuys never ceased to emphasize the act of art or to conceive of art itself as an action. His entire oeuvre aims at dissolving the distinction between art and life, at recognizing creativity in every milieu, whether it be in the way an artist paints a canvas or a homemaker makes a home. It was with this exuberant, affirmative ethos that Beuys proclaimed that "Everyone is an artist," thereby opening the incestuous, pretentious culture of art to the social world at large. He called it "social plastic".
Legend has it that Beuys' artistic career got its start from his brush with death in World War II. His fighter plane crashed, leaving Beuys abandoned in the arctic climate of the Crimea. Fortunately for him , he was discovered unconscious and frozen by a band of nomadic Tartars. They wrapped him in felt and fat and nurtured him back to life. These materials, along with his near-death experience and the love of life it engendered, became prominent themes in Beuys’ work.
In fact, Beuys came to see the transition from coldness to warmth as an appropriate message for the modern world, one which would counter the destructive tendencies in contempory culture. Beuys was sensitive to the undercurrent of nihilism in modern art -- a kind of coldness or even death, the freezing point of all value. He notoriously proclaimed, "The silence of Marcel Duchamp is overrated," insinuating that this silence was a dead end for art, incapable of spawning positive change. By becoming excessively conceptual, art had lost its connection to life, severed itself from its foundation in experience. In opposition to this aesthetic of death, Beuys insisted on returning to the personal as the wellspring of art, even if this meant revisiting painful or traumatic events. It was with this attitude that Beuys created his 1965 piece "How to Explain Pictures to a Dead Hare," which focused on the theme of rebirth from death and involved the use of the same fat and felt that had once saved Beuys himself.
Beuys was not only a sculptor but a painter, a sketcher and a thinker. His first works to gain public notoriety were the wax-and-wood sculptures in his "Queen Bee" series (1952), which look like organs and embryos from an unknown species. In 1962 he met Nam June Paik and began to concentrate on large-scale, concept-driven Fluxus happenings. The happenings were live performances that combined artistic and spiritual issues with social and political ones, in a mood of spontanaeity and improvisation. However, Beuys became disenchanted with the Fluxus group for its lack of serious political commitment; he claimed that it merely "held a mirror up to people without indicating how to change anything."
Change was the only constant for Beuys. Indeed, most of his pieces have changed through time, relying as they do on materials that decay, ferment, dry up, or change color. Since life is in a constant state of flux, he reasoned, art, in order to bring itself closer to life, must be similarly ephemeral. It was thus in change that Beuys sought to bring about the ultimate unity between art and life.
7000 Oaks, Dia Center for the Arts' coverage of Beuys' "7000 Oaks" (begun 1982) includes an essay by Lynne Cooke, photos from Dia's 1996 extension of the project in New York, postcards designed by Beuys to accompany the work, a related paper from the Free International University, and a documentary movie. Links to Dia's extensive collection of Beuys' works, many of which are viewable online, are also provided.
http://www.diacenter.org/ltproj/7000/7000.html
Art Minimal & Conceptual Only: Joseph Beuys, Beuys' comments on his "Multiples" works accompany a brief biography, citations from a 1979 interview, and a few images.
http://home.sprynet.com/~mindweb/page184.htm
Walker Art Center: "Beuys/Logos", Julie Luchenbach's hyper-essay, entitled "Beuys/Logos," is not only thorough and informed scholarship, but is a true work of art in itself.
http://www.walkerart.org/beuys/hyper/suit.html
Fluxus Portal, The official Fluxus web site includes a tiny snippet on Beuys and plenty of information on other Fluxus-related artists and resources.