Joseph Beuys

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Joseph Beuys is arguably the most important & most controversial German artist of the late twentieth century not least because his persona is interwoven with Germany's fascist past This book illuminates two defining threads in Beuys's life & art the centrality of trauma & his sustained investigation of the very notion of art itself In addition to the materials of fat & felt that Beuys used widely in his oeuvre numerous Beuys artworks are autobiogra-ph-ical in content His self-woven legend of rescue & redemption still strikes many as a highly inappropriate fantasy or even an outright lie located as it is in the harrowing context of the Second World War as it was lived by a German soldier or ' Nazi' Nevertheless Beuys's self-mythology confronted the post-traumatic foregrounding his struggle for psychic recovery Perhaps most importantly this led to his major efforts to expand Western art freeing artists after him to work in a thoroughly interdisciplinary way & to embrace anthropological conclusions about art & culture Beuys's lived experience determined a consistent commitment to peaceful change & positive transformation not only through his work but in the discussions & institutions he initiated His notion of activism-as-art has not only become a widespread practice but is predominant in contemporary art of the twenty-first century Exploring Beuys's expansive conception of art & following him into the realms of science politics & spirituality this book in contrast to many other accounts of Beuys's life attributes extraordinary importance to his own myth-making as a positive force in the post-war confrontation of Germany's past