Joseph Beuys Quotes

Directly after the interviews his holiness the 14th Dalai Lama of Tibet had given me [Louwrien Wijers] in Dharamsala, I enthusiastically informed Joseph Beuys how struck I was by the similarity in the viewpoint of His Holiness the Dalai Lama and the ideas that he himself had been working towards in his 'Social Sculpture' for the last fifteen years. I was able to come to this conclusion because my questions in the first interview with his Holiness had for a large part been inspired by the subjects Joseph Beuys had put to discussion first through his 'Organisation for a Direct Democracy', and then through his 'Free international University,' the ecological 'Green movement' and the political party 'The Greens'. The immediate reply from Joseph Beuys to my remark was that 'he would very much want to set up a permanent co-operation with His Holiness the Dalai Lama'.

He [ Marcel Duchamp ] entered this object [the 'Urinal' ready-made] into the museum and noticed that its transportation from one place to another made it into art. But he failed to draw the clear and simple conclusion that every man is an artist.

The idea of creativity is for me the problem of the future. Since the creative power is not a simple thing. It has a rich structure. It is divided into a lot of different principles and represented by figures, and these figures you can also write down in a kind of symbolic mantra. It is important to work on every point of creativity and see how the human being stands in the energy that comes out from the surrounding world.

Art is the only power to free humankind from all repression.

I want to found a free school for creativity and interdisciplinary research in Düsseldorf [where Beuys was teaching at the Art Academy]. I hope that I will succeed. Everyone can come to me. This school has a legal status.. .First a school is there to develop ability, that is consciousness, then the children will recognize what a future social structure should look like; that means that one can learn a social feeling or a social sense...

People are very shortsighted when they argue that way, when they say: Beuys makes everything with felt, so he's trying to say something about the concentration camps [of the German Nazi regime]. Nobody bothers to ask whether I might not be more interested in evoking a very colorful world as an anti-image inside people with the help of this element, felt. So it's a matter of evoking a lucid world, a clear, lucid, perhaps transcendentally spiritual world through something which looks quite different, through an anti-image.

My objects are to be seen as stimulants for the transformation of the idea of sculpture.. ..or of art in general. They should provoke thoughts about what sculpture can be and how the concept of sculpting can be extended to the invisible materials used by everyone.

I am interested in the creativity of the criminal attitude because I recognize in it the existence of a special condition of crazy creativity. A creativity without morals fired only by the energy of freedom and the rejection of all codes and laws. For freedom rejects the dictated roles of the law and of the imposed order and for this reason is isolated.

I think art is the only political power, the only revolutionary power, the only evolutionary power, the only power to free humankind form all repression. I say not that art has already realized this, on the contrary, and because it has not, it has to be developed as a weapon, at first there are radical levels, then you can speak about special details.

I go to the typical state school and try to infiltrate it. Yes!.. .One can do something in the institutions in trying to infiltrate them, and outside one can do something to set a model in place.. .One must work with divers methods anyway. One must always carry on with what is possible.

For me it is the WORD that produces all images. It is the key sign for all processes of moulding and organizing. When I use language, I try to induce the impulses of this power.. ..the power of evolution.
But language is not to be understood simply in terms of speech and words. That is our current, drastically reduced, understanding of language.. .Beyond language as verbalization lies a world of sound and form impulses, a language of primary sound without semantic content, but laden with completely different levels of information.

Only then would the insistence on participation of the action art of FLUXUS and Happening be fulfilled; only then would democracy be fully realized. Only a conception of art revolutionized to this degree can turn into a politically productive force, coursing through each person, and shaping history.

Only on condition of a radical widening of definitions will it be possible for art and activities related to art [to] provide evidence that art is now the only evolutionary-revolutionary power. Only art is capable of dismantling the repressive effects of a senile social system that continues to totter along the death-line: to dismantle in order to build 'A SOCIAL ORGANISM AS A WORK OF ART'.

I think the tree is an element of regeneration which in itself is a concept of time. The oak is especially so because it is a slowly growing tree with a kind of really solid heartwood. It has always been a form of sculpture, a symbol for this planet.

In: Times Thermic Machine, 1982