The following was presented at the symposium "Joseph Beuys in America" April, 2001 organized by the Fine Arts Gallery at UMBC in partnership with the Baltimore Museum of Art.

 

Beuys' Energy Plan by Glen Hanson

Joseph Beuys at the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, MN, January 18, 1974

 

When Beuys made his first visit to the United States in 1974, he presented what he called Energy Plan for the Western Man in a series of wide ranging lectures which incorporated art, science, and religion in mapping out his vision for the healing and "righting" of the unbalanced western world view.

As Caroline Tisdall noted " He was tortured by the separation of the spiritual and material in society, the divided self in the individual." What Beuys saw around him was a culture "that allowed for only a single and highly specialized methodology for the utilization of the dead and physical aspects of the world, of the physical and mathematical aspects of the world, and its only object is the exploitation of the world and the possibility of digging out everything which can be extracted from it, and all to the exclusive benefit of what we might term a sort of selfish profit." Beuys felt that this one sided technical rationality must be assigned it's legitimate, if limited place within a larger more comprehensive rationality which addresses our spiritual needs as humans and at the same time acknowledges our responsibilities to the earth as well as to others.

In his book Voltaire's Bastards, the Dictatorship of Reason in the West, John Ralston Saul writes:

"This is an age of great conformity. It is difficult to find another period of such absolute conformism in the history of Western Civilization. The citizens are so completely locked inside their boxes of expertise that they are effectively excluded from open public debate."

"While our mythology suggests that society is like a tree with the ripening fruits of professional individualism growing thick upon it, a more accurate image would show a maze of corridors, blocked by endless locked doors, each one leading in or out of a small cell." (1)

For Beuys, even contemporary art at this time in history had become one of the confining, narrow "boxes of expertise", and social sculpture was a strategy for liberating creativity from culturally imposed restraints.

Beuys felt that he had hit upon a core idea with social sculpture. It seemed for Beuys that social sculpture provided an escape from the cul de sac of the traditional art world. Beuys was no longer satisfied with manipulating materials to create objects for a narrow, special interest group. As an artist, he took the radical step of dispensing with the object and instead began to work directly with the milieu from which art arose, his society. The world was no longer the background for his artwork, but the new material with which he worked.

In London during the spring of 1982 as he was planning the 7000 Oaks project, Beuys had what he considered his final gallery exhibition. Regarding this show Beuys said:

It puts a kind of line under my so-called spatial doings in so-called environments. I want it principally to mark the finish of this kind of work. I wish to go more and more outside to be among the problems of nature and problems of human beings in their working places. This will be a regenerative activity, it will be a therapy for all the problems we are standing before. That is my general aim." (2)

Creativity can no longer remain just the domain of the artist as highly trained specialist, but must become an essential condition of human life. Creativity = Freedom, said Beuys. Creativity is that area of ourselves where all change comes from.

He saw the potential for transformation not in government programs, or one "ism" or another, be in capitalism or Marxism. He rejected this top-down model, and saw instead the potential for change coming from individual transformation, from the bottom up. As a result the structure of society would be generated by the true needs and values of its people, and exist for their good.

It was out of this model that social sculpture evolved as the mechanism for change, with creativity as the medium of individual transformation toward true freedom, economic, political and spiritual. Through this expanded notion of creativity the concept of social sculpture acts as a unifying and holistic way of looking at human society, which encompasses and integrates art, science, and wisdom.

 

The notion of social sculpture is imbedded in our language. A powerful leader "reshapes" society, a marketer "carves out" a niche, opinions are "molded", movements are "crushed" under the "weight" of public opinion, people who are widely admired are even "placed on a pedestal". Thus from within our use of ordinary language we posit our public sphere as one with weight, volume, surface, texture, something to be molded, carved and shaped, much as a sculptor would act upon a piece of marble.

Indeed it seems that the idea of social sculpture existed in our use of language as a potential intuition before Beuys named it.

In an essay on Indigenous Ceremonial Dialogue in South America, we find an interesting parallel to Beuys's social sculpture. In his conclusion, Mr. Urban writes: "I have suggested that the general function of ceremonial dialogues everywhere throughout native South America is to direct attention to the process of social coordination and to the solidarity that is consequently achieved. This coordination is something that is present in the dialogue itself. Each dialogic performance is an instance of solidarity achieved through the mutual paying attention to another and through the overt acknowledgment or signaling of comprehension of the other. Simultaneously, each dialogic performance suggests how that solidarity can be achieved in other social interactions. In this sense, ceremonial dialogue is capable of acting as a "model for" conduct, as a blueprint for how solidarity is to be achieved." (3)

Beuys's Energy Plan for the Western Man I believe, can be seen as an example of ceremonial dialogue, where the content of his speech is secondary to the model he offers us of what radical thinking looks like.

In a 1971 interview critic Achille Bonito Oliva commented to Beuys:

Q. "It seems to me that your work is the extending of a kind of 'Socratic space' in which the works are no more than a pretext for dialogue with the individual.

A. This is the most important side of my work. The rest - objects, drawings, actions - all take second place. Basically I'm not that much connected to art. Art interests me only in so far as it gives me the possibility of dialogue with individuals." (4)

Dialogue is a specific form of discourse with a long formal history going back to the Greeks. The ideal of dialogue requires a symmetry of participation and good will. Everyone is equal, not physically, socially, or culturally, but equal in their participation in the process of dialogue itself. It is uncoerced, not power based, and its goal is mutual understanding and growth. It's goal is not to arrive at a final conclusion, but to an ever deepening understanding which is always conditional, subject to change through yet another dialogue.

It is through open, unconstrained dialogue that Beuys sees the potential for healing the divided individual, balancing the western one-sidedness of technology and scientific knowledge with wisdom gained through deeper understanding of our mutual concerns, of who we are, and who we can be. This is the rich and fertile ground out of which, like one of Beuys' oak trees, the future should grow.

Beuys states: Freedom means mostly the freedom of the other, it's not at all a question of one's own freedom, it's a question of the freedom of my brothers and my sisters or of my sisters or my brothers. So when I come out of my laboratory, or my workshop, or whatever I want to call the place where I am trying to produce something, or to get something done, or to effect a collaboration with other people as a whole community of workers, I can't simply declare that you have to believe in what I have done, or that what I have done is quality product simply because it happens to be my product; I can't even declare that it has any particular qualities at all. All I can do is to take advantage of the possibility or to accept the duty of showing people what I have done, and then I have to ask them whether or not it is useful. And if we were to begin to make use of or to practice this kind of technique, we'd very soon find ourselves capable of being truly productive." (from "Difesa Della Natura, a cura di Lucrezia De Domizio, Il Quadrante Edizioni, 1988, p.75)

 

Notes
1. John Ralston Saul, Voltaire's Bastards, The Dictorship of Reason in the West, (Vintage Books, New York, 1993).
2. Joseph Beuys, Energy Plan for the Western Man, Joseph Beuys in America, writings by and interviews with the artist with introductory essays by Kim Levin and Caroline Tisdall, compiled by Carin Kuoni, (Four Walls Eight Windows, New York, 1990) p. 110.
3. Greg Urban, Ceremonial Dialogues in South America, printed in the book the interpretation of dialogue, edited by Tullio Maranhao, (The University of Chicago Press, 1990).
4. Achille Bonito Oliva, from an interview titled A Score by Joseph Beuys: We Are the Revolution, 1971.
5. Joseph Beuys, DIFESA DELLA NATURA, compiled by Lucrezia De Domizio, (Il Quadrante Edizioni, Torino, Italy, 1988), p. 75.

 

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