Joseph Beuys
By: Claudia Mesch
Series: Critical lives; Critical lives (London, England)
Publisher: Reaktion Books
Published: 2017
Language: eng
Number of pages: 152
ISBN-13: 9781780237350
Subjects: Biography; Artists
Description: Joseph Beuys is arguably the most important and most controversial German artist of the late twentieth century. This book illuminates two defining threads in Beuys's life and art: the centrality of trauma, and his sustained investigation of the very notion of art itself. Many of Beuys's artworks are autobiographical in content. His self-woven legend of rescue and redemption still strikes many as an inappropriate fantasy, located as it is in the harrowing context of the Second World War.  Beuys's self-mythology confronted the post-traumatic, foregrounding his struggle for psychic recovery. This led to his efforts to extend  the purview of Western art, freeing artists after him to work in a thoroughly interdisciplinary way. His notion of activism-as-art has become predominant in contemporary art of the twenty-first century. Exploring Beuys's expansive conception of art and following him into the realms of science, politics and spirituality, this book attributes extraordinary importance to Beuys's myth-making as a positive force in the post-war confrontation of Germany's past.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references (pages 129-148).
Table of contents: title: The bad father; title: Crisis and Catholicism; title: Performance, autobiography, 'life course/work course'; title: Romantic science, medicine, shamanism; title: Activism and party politics; title: The artist's image and 'block'.