Joseph Beuys Art

The essence of art is truly in the eye of the beholder, and Joseph Beuys redefined the meaning of artistry when he once said that “every man is a plastic artist who must determine things for himself.” One may find himself or herself asking the million dollar question: “Who is Joseph Beuys?” Joseph Beuys was a German-born conceptual artist who started to pursue art as a career after serving as an airman in the Second World War. Beuys's assorted body of work ranges from the conventional methods of drawing, painting, and sculpture, to process-oriented, or time-based "action" art. With his time-based “actions”, Beuys suggested how art might exercise a healing property on both the artist and the audience when psychological, social, and political are the influence.

Beuys was a crucial member in the 1960s Fluxus movement, along with his contemporaries Yoko Ono and Nam June Paik. During the movement, many artists befell dissatisfied with the traditional standard of heroic, religious, or rather object-oriented painting and sculpture that had been long in place before them. Influenced in part by existing experimentations in music, such artists found themselves spinning away from the art community's predominant customs in favor of found, everyday items for creating momentary, time-based actions, transient installation art, and other largely action-oriented events. According to an interview with Erwin Heerich, a friend of Beuys, "The contact with Fluxus endowed the issue of art and life, in Beuys' mind, with a radically different significance. In Fluxus he recognized a vital current that released new impulses in himself--and here the other side of Beuys emerged, his powerful sensitivity to, and talent for, the public arena and the media." Be...

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...ughout Kassel Germany, each accompanied by a 4 foot basalt stone marker, Beuys believed that not only would the Oaks help improve the biosphere but that the trees would also raise ecological consciousness, would represent peoples’ lives and their everyday work, and that the trees represented redevelopment, which in itself is a notion of time.

Through successful conceptualization and execution of his “action” installations, Joseph Beuys was able to present how he and many others felt about such matters related to psychology, the social structure, and politics. The messages in Beuys’s works may not have been clear to many, but he sought to show that all humans are creative and that art is not meant to be easily understood because there wouldn’t be a need for art if is was. I believe Joseph Beuys can be considered one of the greatest time-based performers of his time.