Joseph Beuys: An Interview

Joseph Beuys was born in Kleve, Germany in 1921. After serving as a volunteer in the German military, Beuys attended the Dusseldorf Academy of Art to study sculpture, where in 1959 he became a professor. Much of his artwork reflects his attempt to come to terms with his involvement in the war. During the ’60s, Beuys became acquainted with the group Fluxus and artists such as Nam June Paik. The Fluxus movement inspired Beuys, and he staged “actions” to promote the idea that the artistic process was more important than a final product; for example, Beuys felt that all people were artists because they shape the content of their particular environment. Beuys’s political activism, his broad concept of creativity, and his commitment to both art and education challenged the traditional role of an artist. While he considered activism, discussion, and teaching essential to his expanded definition of art, Beuys also engaged in traditional artistic practice, creating objects and installations and performing.

In this interview, Beuys insists upon an enlarged understanding of art, excavating his own early intuitions with great care from his tangled experiences as a child in interwar Germany. The contradiction between an undestroyed natural environment, full of possibility, and the deeply troubled social body at the time was an intense and formative one for Beuys, who recounts that “when I was five years old, I felt that my life had to go to an end because I experienced already too much of this contradiction.” Beuys’ unconventional intellectual trajectory finds references in his understanding and categorization of nature as a child; his resistance to positivistic, materialistic methodology as a student of the natural sciences; and his strong devotion to finding the proper epistemological foundations for his talents and practice as an art student. Moving through these and other phases of his biography, Beuys tracks his increasing ability to analyze the contradictions he felt, and the urgency at that time of renewing and re-posing questions central to the life, labor and freedom of the people.

Beuys also addresses his work as an artist (contemporary to the interview), correcting misconceptions, explaining his engagement with materials, the idea of innovation beyond the given of nature, form, the limits of preparation for a performance, and other issues important to his art practice. Beuys continually addresses the urgency of an expanded understanding of art with the radical potential to transform the social body, against an academic understanding of formal innovation that retakes and empties these possibilities. He addresses criticisms of his performances with a radical critique of interpretation, and a description of the sculptural qualities of thought, voice, and affect. In an interview where Beuys clearly aims to be understood and to communicate his life and ideas, he holds out the vital possibility of “another kind of art” where aesthetics is meaningless except as “the human being in itself.”

A historical interview originally recorded in 1980 and re-edited in 2003.