Joseph Beuys Quotes

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'.

My intention: healthy chaos, healthy amorphousness in a known medium which consciously warmed a cold, torpid form from the past, a convention of society, and which makes possible future forms.

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...

I wished to go completely outside and to make a symbolic start for my enterprise of regenerating the life of human kind within the body of society and to prepare a positive future in this context... I can see such a use for the future as representing the really progressive character of the idea of understanding art when it is related to the life of humankind within the social body in the future.

This is why we believe that a well-ordered idea of ecology and professionalism can stem only from art – art in the sense of the sole, revolutionary force, capable of transforming the earth, humanity, the social order etc.. ..Art is, then, a genuinely human medium for revolutionary change in the sense of completing the transformation from a sick world to a healthy one. In my opinion only art is capable of doing it.

I think he [ Andy Warhol ] would be very interested in the moment that the Dalai Lama appears, being involved in such a kind of idea. Andy has always difficulties with this kind of political activities, because he works in another kind of world, but he is always.. .Also when he was here [in Germany] last week, he is very interested to hear a lot of new information. He has a kind of observing sense in the back of his mind. So, he is always interested to follow the development, and there is really a kind of imaginative process going on, I think.

To be a teacher is my greatest work of art. The rest is the waste product, a demonstration. If you want to express yourself you must present something tangible. But after a while this has only the function of a historic document. Objects aren't very important any more. I want to get to the origin of matter, to the thought behind it.

It is a kind of vehicle, you know. It's a kind of making, spreading out ideas, that is what I think. It spreads out the idea. You must care for information and I personally try to make information available not only in a written way.. .I try also to work with images, with fantasy, with jokes, with humor. It accelerates the discussion of the problem of a new society.. ..so I work coming from the idea of art as the most important means to transform the society.

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.

In: Times Thermic Machine, 1982

Even the act of peeling a potato can be an artistic act if it is consciously done.

Yes, now we are at the starting-point again. Now we are at our real issue: that we understand ourselves first as sites of education, for information for democracy, for tree-part structure, and so on.

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

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.

For instance the idea of intuition, imagination, inspiration.. ..is related in the principle to an invisible world.. ..when I call these drawings 'The Secret Block' then I try to stress this part of reality as the most important part because spiritual existence is firstly.. .I find if we are only confronted with this hard part of the world, this already done part of the world, we are not.. ..related to the whole idea of reality.. ..the mission of the art is to make visible the whole reality..