It is impossible to separate the art of Joseph Beuys from his teaching…. This symposium explores how teaching was as much a medium of Beuys’s art as drawing or sculpture.” Coming up in April there’s a discussion on Joseph Beuys and Christianity – “Beuys’s concern with transcending materialism found expression in an eclectic and personal religious iconography, drawing on pantheism, Norse, and Celtic myths and other spiritual sources. The links to Christianity are especially strong.” Then there are a series of Social Sculpture Research Seminars – “Shelley Sacks, interdisciplinary artist and Director of the Social Sculpture Research Unit [at Oxford Brookes University], worked with Joseph Beuys for many years. She is joined by a number of German and UK practitioners in these unique research seminars. By enabling a closer understanding of Beuys’s work and contemporary social sculpture projects, participants will have the opportunity to consider a range of expanded art practices committed to facilitating a democratic and ecologically sustainable world.” [“Social Sculpture” is a piece of Beuysian jargon: “He formulated a theory of ‘social sculpture’, exploring ways in which the creative impulse that shaped a work of art could also influence the world in which we live.”]
If Beuys has, as claimed, shifted the emphasis “from what an artist makes to his personality, activities and opinions” then we have a recipe for precisely this: the cult of the artist. I always though it was a tired commonplace about the art gallery replacing the church in our secular age, but perhaps there’s more to it than I’d realised.
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