Joseph Beuys and Surrealism

Spinoza in Vegas, Sturtevant Everywhere: A Case of Critical (Re‐)Discoveries and Artistic Self‐Reinventions

“…65 However, in effect, she latched onto the aura of an artist who was to become what Buchloh has rather sceptically referred to as 'a fi gure of social worship' and 'a national hero of the fi rst order'. 66 The circumstances of her turn to Beuys' pupil Kiefer more than twenty years later were somewhat different. Unlike Beuys earlier on, Kiefer was then a bestseller, especially in the American market.…”

The project of Joseph Beuys "7000 oaks" as a way of healing from the injuries of historical memory

“…Он проводит параллель с творчеством Рихарда Вагнера, которое не принималось в Европе, но имело поддержку баварского короля Людвига II. Но это была работа с немецкой мифологией, с предвидением того кошмара, который в ХХ в. придет через две мировые войны [8].…”

Pumping Honey

“…Thus Buchloh, keeping a safe distance from the works exhibited at the Guggenheim -or any works of Beuys, really -felt authorized to state as fact that the 'visual experience' of 'Beuys's works' is 'profoundly dissatisfying'. 53 In a fit of cleanliness, he noted that Beuys's use of ugly and abject materials such as the emblematic felt and fat combo, his predilection for 'a particularly obvious kind of brown paint', ought to be considered as evidence of an infantile regression and anal fixation and hence, in a particularly obvious conflation of brown taints, revealed 'every aspect of his work as being totally dependent on and deriving from' the 'period of German fascism'. 54 Buchloh's pathologizations quickly exceeded the clinically possible: according to him, Beuys was 'a perfidious trickster', a compulsive liar, both 'neurotic' and 'narcissistic', driven by 'compulsive self-exposure', 55 his work the result of 'his own hypertrophic unconscious processes at the edge of sanity'.…”

“…Buchloh was only partly concerned with the base materiality of the mythically morphing Beuys; what he feared even more is the atemporal fissure Beuys stands for: Ahistoricity, that unconscious or deliberate obliviousness toward the specific conditions that determine the reality of an individual's being and work in historical time, is the functional basis on which public and private mythologies can be erected, presuming that a public exists that craves myths in proportion to its lack of comprehension of historic actuality. 111 The very undialectic nature of these enlightened assertions aside, the honey pump represents anything but a private mythology. As we have seen, site-specificity began to dominate Beuys's work only in 1977, but in the case of the honey pump, this site-specificity became, in addition, the conduit of social plasticity qua historicization.…”