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Joseph Beuys Quotes
1921–1986 Germany
Joseph Beuys (May 12, 1921 – January 23, 1986) was a German conceptual artist, who produced work in a number of forms including sculpture, performance art, video art and installations. He was inspired by the ideas of Rudolf Steiner and the French artist Yves Klein.
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This is precisely what the shaman does in order to bring about change and development: his nature is therapeutic.
I try to go further on over the threshold where modern art ends and anthropological art has to start.
Even the act of peeling a potato can be an artistic act if it is consciously done.
Art is the only power to free humankind from all repression.
My intention: healthy chaos, healthy amorphousness in a known medium which consciously warmed a cold, torpid form from the past, a convention of society, and which makes possible future forms.
School is universal. That means, on the street – when you talk about these things with people at the grocer's; the school is at the grocer's at that moment.
This most modern art discipline - Social Sculpture
Art alone makes life possible – this is how radically I should like to formulate it. I would say that without art man is inconceivable in physiological terms.
I think the tree is an element of regeneration which in itself is a concept of time. The oak is especially so because it is a slowly growing tree with a kind of really solid heartwood. It has always been a form of sculpture, a symbol for this planet.
Joseph Beuys (1982)
He [ Marcel Duchamp ] entered this object [the 'Urinal' ready-made] into the museum and noticed that its transportation from one place to another made it into art. But he failed to draw the clear and simple conclusion that every man is an artist.
QUESTION: A well-known saying of yours asserts that 'Every man is an artist.' If every man is an artist, then why have art academies and art professors at all?
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 death-line: to dismantle in order to build 'A SOCIAL ORGANISM AS A WORK OF ART'.
Yes, now we are at the starting-point again. Now we are at our real issue: that we understand ourselves first as sites of education, for information for democracy, for tree-part structure, and so on.
I believe that planting these oaks is necessary not only in biospheric terms, that is to say, in the context of matter and ecology, but in that it will raise ecological consciousness-raise it increasingly, in the course of the years to come, because we shall never stop planting.
My objects are to be seen as stimulants for the transformation of the idea of sculpture.. ..or of art in general. They should provoke thoughts about what sculpture can be and how the concept of sculpting can be extended to the invisible materials used by everyone.
I am interested in the creativity of the criminal attitude because I recognize in it the existence of a special condition of crazy creativity. A creativity without morals fired only by the energy of freedom and the rejection of all codes and laws. For freedom rejects the dictated roles of the law and of the imposed order and for this reason is isolated.