"Every human being is an artist, a freedom being, called to participate in transforming and reshaping the conditions, thinking and structures that shape and inform our lives"
Joseph Beuys

I Like America and America Likes Me - 1974*

Joseph Beuys 1921 | 1986 - Germany's most influential post-war artist. An early interest in natural history, country lore and mythology left evident traces in his visionary and extremly diverse work: he was a Performance artist, a sculptor, lecturer, assembler of installations of gigantic scale and founder of Organization for Direct Democracy (1972), after becoming involved in the political arenna. Beuys also made video art and drawings.

Social Sculpture: 'Another world is possible'
Our territory and practices are wide and varied because social sculpture has to do with exploring new values, new forms of thinking and new ways of being in the world.

... 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 to which each person can contribute creatively.
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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.

Beuys, Transdisciplinarity and a Sustainable Future
The SSRU | Social Sculpture Research Unit | encourages and explores transdisciplinary creativity and vision towards the shaping of a humane and ecologically viable society. It engages with Beuys thinking and work, as well as those before and after him - making available some of the insights, inquiries and explorations in this multidimensional field.

Beuys understands our society in all its facets as a reality which has to be formed artistically. This formative attempt for a sculpture for the future Beuys calls social plastic.

F.I.U. FREE INTERNATIONAL UNIVERSITY

* I Like America and America Likes Me - 1974
Beuys’s most famous Action took place in May 1974, when he spent three days in a room with a coyote. After flying into New York, he was swathed in felt and loaded into an ambulance, then driven to the gallery where the Action took place, without having once touched American soil. As Beuys later explained: ‘I wanted to isolate myself, insulate myself, see nothing of America other than the coyote.’ The title of the work is filled with irony. Beuys opposed American military actions in Vietnam, and his work as an artist was a challenge to the hegemony of American art.