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Joseph was either a unicorn or a nazi, but he sure loved his felt and fat.
Joseph Beuys was born in Kleve, a city in Germany very close to the Dutch border. My family is from Kleve so that means we’re practically family right? He is well known for being a notorious liar, for his crazy performances and for using odd materials in his installations.
As a teenager, Joseph was interested in Nordic history and mythology, natural sciences and art. Even though he visited the studio of the Flemish painter and sculptor Achilles Moortgat numerous times, he eventually chose a career in medicine. But then Adolf Hitler decided to be the biggest asshole and WW2 began. In 1940, Joseph decided to join the military voluntarily, in order to avoid the draft. They trained him to be an aircraft radio operator and a combat pilot. During these years in the army, he was seriously wounded numerous times.
This is where the myth of Beuys starts. Story goes he once got shot down somewhere in the Crimea, a peninsula between Ukraine and Russia. Luckily the Tatars found him. They wrapped him up in fat and felt, like a tartar sandwich. It warmed his body and saved his life. Sounds too good to be true...and it is. Records state that he was found by a German search commando, no Tatars to be seen. Nevertheless, it's an awesome story and it was the inspiration for many awesome artworks. Another thing we do know for sure is at the end of the war the Brits held him as a prisoner-of-war. In 1945 Hitler and his snot mop got defeated and Joseph was eventually allowed to return to Kleve.
After the war he was like “Eff that career in medicine!”. Who needs hospitals when felt and fat cure you as well? He enrolled in the Düsseldorf Academy of Art instead to study sculpture. Felt, fat and medicine played a big role through out his artistic career. And hares, dead hares. During one of his iconic performances he “explained pictures to a dead hare," covered in honey and gold. Gross, but pretty awesome.
A total wacko, Joseph has a lot of haters. Some call him infantile and messianic. Some accuse him of disavowing his traumatic past. And last, but certainly not least, some say that Joseph had more connections to the Nazis than just serving in the war. It might be true that he was a dedicated follower of occultist and racist ideas and hung out with quite a few former Nazis. But then again, none of this has been confirmed....the myth continues.
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Here is what Wikipedia says about Joseph Beuys
Joseph Heinrich Beuys (/bɔɪs/ BOYSS,
German: [ˈjoːzɛf ˈbɔʏs]; 12 May 1921 – 23 January 1986) was a German artist, teacher, performance artist, and art theorist whose work reflected concepts of humanism, sociology. With Heinrich Böll, Johannes Stüttgen, Caroline Tisdall, Robert McDowell, and Enrico Wolleb, Beuys created the Free International University for Creativity & Interdisciplinary Research (FIU). Through his talks and performances, he also formed The Party for Animals and The Organisation for Direct Democracy. He was a member of a Dadaist art movement Fluxus and singularly inspirational in developing of Performance Art, called Kunst Aktionen, alongside Wiener Aktionismus that Allan Kaprow and Carolee Schneemann termed Art Happenings. Today, internationally, the largest performance art group is BBeyond in Belfast, led by Alastair MacLennan who knew Beuys and like many adapts Beuys's ethos.
Beuys is known for his "extended definition of art" in which the ideas of social sculpture could potentially reshape society and politics. He frequently held open public debates on a wide range of subjects, including political, environmental, social, and long-term cultural issues.
Beuys' social sculpture proposals and underpinning ideas have been extensively explored, shared and developed through the practices, pedagogies, actions and writings of his master student and collaborator Shelley Sacks, first in South Africa in the 1970s as a branch of the Free International University (FIU); in the first Social Sculpture Colloquium, hosted by the Goethe Institute in Glasgow (1995); from 1997-2018 as Professor in Social Sculpture in the Social Sculpture Research Unit (SSRU) at Oxford Brookes University, where Johannes Stüttgen, Caroline Tisdall and Volker Harlan were research fellows; and since 2021, through the Social Sculpture Lab, curated by Sacks and hosted by the Documenta Archive in 2021 for the Beuys Centenery. The Social Sculpture Lab continues to engage with, develop and share Beuys' social sculpture understandings through such initiatives as the 7000 HUMANS Global Social Forest,. which has close connections with Beuys' 7000 Oaks, Sacks' social sculpture-connective practice methodologies, and a growing network of Social Sculpture Hubs in Germany, India, Holland, Brazil and UK.
Beuys was professor at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf from 1961 until 1972. He was a founding member and life-long supporter of the German Green Party.
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