Joseph Beuys - People Quotes

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People who say: 'Ah, this Beuys will go back to the middle ages, or to the stone dwellers, cliff dwellers.' No, there is a misunderstanding. I have nothing against the materialistic methodology of analytics, but I think we have to enlarge this thing, not to get caught in a very restricted one-sidedness in our way of looking towards life. Because the problems of life, soul, humankind's spirit, the problems of intuition, imagination, and inspiration, the problems of birth and death, the problems of survival in a bigger shape, and to bring in the image of the meaning of man.

Joseph Beuys
But I saw the relationship between people, I saw their thoughts, I saw their kind of expressionistic behavior in every difficult situation. I saw all the time the unclearness in the psychological condition of the people. You know, that was the time called the 'Roaring Twenties' and I felt that this expressionistic behavior, this unformed quality of soul power and emotion of life... I saw it, that it would lead to a kind of catastrophe. That was my general feeling.

Joseph Beuys
People are very shortsighted when they argue that way, when they say: Beuys makes everything with felt, so he's trying to say something about the concentration camps [of the German Nazi regime]. Nobody bothers to ask whether I might not be more interested in evoking a very colorful world as an anti-image inside people with the help of this element, felt. So it's a matter of evoking a lucid world, a clear, lucid, perhaps transcendentally spiritual world through something which looks quite different, through an anti-image.

Joseph Beuys
Creativity is not limited to people practising one of the traditional forms of art, and even in the case of artists, creativity is not confined to the exercise of their art. Each one of us has a creative potential, which is hidden by competitiveness and success-aggression. To recognize, explore and develop this potential is the task of the School. Creation – whether it be a painting, sculpture, symphony or novel – involves not merely talent, intuition, powers of imagination and application, but also the ability to shape material that could be expanded to other socially relevant spheres.

Joseph Beuys
My art cannot be understood primarily by thinking. My art touches people who are in tune with my mode of thinking. But it is clear that people cannot understand my art by intellectual processes alone, because no art can be experienced in that way.

Joseph Beuys
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.

Joseph Beuys
No area of life will be free from this concept in the future. That means that people will recognize the social organism, and they must think within this context. They must not only think about schools but also about the legal system and economic structures. They must always think through the entire social organism...

Joseph Beuys