What is Art?: Conversation with Joseph Beuys

"I know that from him [Rudolf Steiner] a mission was given to me to gradually remove people’s alienation and mistrust toward the supersensible through my means. In political thinking—the field I have to be working on daily—it is a matter of realizing the Threefold Social Order as quickly as possible." —Joseph Beuys, in a letter to Manfred Schradi, October 21, 1971

Joseph Beuys’s work continues to influence and inspire artists and thinkers around the world—in areas from organizational learning, direct democracy, and new forms of money, to new methods of art education and the practice of "ecological art."

Volker Harlan—a close colleague of Beuys—whose own work also explores substance and sacrament—talked with Beuys about the deeper motivations and insights behind "social sculpture" and his expanded view of art. These profound reflections, complemented by Harlan’s thoughtful essays, give a sense of the interconnected nature of all life forms and provide the basis for a path toward a future that is ecologically sustainable.

Features more than forty illustrations.

Joseph Beuys (1921–1986), alchemist, social visionary and artist, was born in Germany. In 1961, he became Professor of Monumental Sculpture at the Düsseldorf Academy, but was expelled in 1972. With his first gallery "action" in 1965, Teaching Paintings to a Dead Hare, his international reputation began to grow. In 1979, he was honored with a major retrospective at the Guggenheim Museum, New York City. He died just after receiving the prestigious Lehmbruck Prize and left behind numerous large-scale installations and site works, hundreds of provocative multiples and small objects, thousands of drawings, documented social sculpture forums about energy, new money forms and direct democracy, and above all, a methodology and ideas such as "parallel process" and "social sculpture."

Volker Harlan was born in 1938 in Dresden, Germany. He studied arts, biology, and theology, and was a priest of the Christian Community until 2001. He is a cofounder of the private University of Witten-Herdecke and a lecturer on the philosophy of nature and aesthetics. His doctorate was published as Das Bild der Pflanze in Wissenschaft und Kunst. He was a friend of Joseph Beuys from 1972 until Beuys’s death in 1986.