Joseph Beuys Quotes

47 Sourced Quotes

I wished to go completely outside and to make a symbolic start for my enterprise of regenerating the life of human kind within the body of society and to prepare a positive future in this context... I can see such a use for the future as representing the really progressive character of the idea of understanding art when it is related to the life of humankind within the social body in the future.

Joseph Beuys
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
I think art is the only political power, the only revolutionary power, the only evolutionary power, the only power to free humankind form all repression. I say not that art has already realized this, on the contrary, and because it has not, it has to be developed as a weapon, at first there are radical levels, then you can speak about special details.

Joseph Beuys
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.

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
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.

Joseph Beuys
To be a teacher is my greatest work of art. The rest is the waste product, a demonstration. If you want to express yourself you must present something tangible. But after a while this has only the function of a historic document. Objects aren't very important any more. I want to get to the origin of matter, to the thought behind it.

Joseph Beuys
Art is the only power to free humankind from all repression.

Joseph Beuys
For me it is the WORD that produces all images. It is the key sign for all processes of moulding and organizing. When I use language, I try to induce the impulses of this power.... the power of evolution.
But language is not to be understood simply in terms of speech and words. That is our current, drastically reduced, understanding of language... Beyond language as verbalization lies a world of sound and form impulses, a language of primary sound without semantic content, but laden with completely different levels of information.

Joseph Beuys
Here my idea is to declare that art is the only possibility for evolution, the only possibility to change the situation in the world. But then you have to enlarge the idea of art to include the whole creativity. And if you do that, it follows logically that every living being is an artist – an artist in the sense that he can develop his own capacity. And therefore it's necessary at first that society cares about the educational system, that equality of opportunity for self-realization is guaranteed.

Joseph Beuys
We have to ensure that it is structured organically, so that it functions like a person functions internally, like the organs function... First in the examination of the matter. Secondly in that one develops a concept of.... a social order that have never existed before. That simply means: to realize freedom, democracy and socialism – free democratic socialism.

Joseph Beuys
For example, when we leave [The Documenta in] Kassel, a working group or maybe two working groups will work on things here at Kassel. We want to cause a snow-ball effect. We want to build a network throughout Europe that will work on these things, right? I can only say: we can only do it as well as possible.

Joseph Beuys
My first concert - apart from Beethoven at School and Erik Satie at the opening of my exhibition in Kleve in 1960 - was at the gallery Parnass in Wuppertal in 1963. Dressed like a regular pianist in dark grey flannel, black tie and no hat, I played the piano all over – not just the keys – with many pairs of old shoes until it disintegrated. My intention was neither destructive nor nihilistic. "Heal like with like" – similia similibus curantur – in the homeopathic sense. The main intention was to indicate a new beginning.... or simply a revolutionary act. This was my first public Fluxus appearance.

Joseph Beuys
Only then would the insistence on participation of the action art of FLUXUS and Happening be fulfilled; only then would democracy be fully realized. Only a conception of art revolutionized to this degree can turn into a politically productive force, coursing through each person, and shaping history.

Joseph Beuys
'Fat' traverses the path from a chaotically dispersed, undirected energy form to a form. Then it appears in the famous fat corner.... now [a wedge of fat in the angle between seat and back of the wooden old Chair, Beuys used in the fat-sculpture, like 'Stuhl mit Fett (Fet Chair), 1964] intersects the human body in the region that houses certain emotional forces [Beuys laughed, and so did everyone else of the public].

Joseph Beuys
The nature of my sculpture is not fixed and finished. Processes continue in most of them: chemical reactions, fermentation, color changes, delays, drying up. Everything is in a STATE of CHANGE.

Joseph Beuys
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.

Joseph Beuys
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.

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
This most modern art discipline - Social Sculpture / Social Architecture - will only reach fruition when every living person becomes a creator, a sculptor, or architect of the social organism.

Joseph Beuys
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'.

Joseph Beuys
Even the act of peeling a potato can be an artistic act if it is consciously done.

Joseph Beuys
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.

Joseph Beuys
Money has to undergo a metamorphosis again, it has to relinquish its role in the market economy and engage in an economy of capacities. Then we would be concerned with human creative productivity. And we would come full circle, since each human being can then act within his company as co-creator of the future, can - in full dignity - contribute to shaping this future.

Joseph Beuys
The outward appearance of every object I make is the equivalent of some aspect of inner human life... My feelings then had this special kind of darkness – almost black like this mixture of rubber and tar. It is certainly an equivalent of the pathological state mentioned before, and expresses the need to create a space in the mind from which all disturbances were moved: an empty insulated space.

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
I had the feeling that another kind of life — perhaps in a transcendental area — would give me a better possibility to influence, or to work, or to act within this contradiction. So, this was my general feeling: on the one side, this beautiful undamaged nature form which I took a lot and had a lot of possibilities for contemplation, meditation, research, collecting things, making a kind of system; and on the other side, this social debacle that I felt already as a coming dilemma.

Joseph Beuys
I think he [Andy Warhol] would be very interested in the moment that the Dalai Lama appears, being involved in such a kind of idea. Andy has always difficulties with this kind of political activities, because he works in another kind of world, but he is always... Also when he was here [in Germany] last week, he is very interested to hear a lot of new information. He has a kind of observing sense in the back of his mind. So, he is always interested to follow the development, and there is really a kind of imaginative process going on, I think.

Joseph Beuys
The idea of creativity is for me the problem of the future. Since the creative power is not a simple thing. It has a rich structure. It is divided into a lot of different principles and represented by figures, and these figures you can also write down in a kind of symbolic mantra. It is important to work on every point of creativity and see how the human being stands in the energy that comes out from the surrounding world.

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