Joseph Beuys

de Claudia Mesch

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.