Joseph Beuys

The work of Joseph Beuys cannot be understood without reference to certain events of his life. Similarly, Beuys's life appears to have been informed by specific incidents that mark it as peculiarly modern in character. A number of critics have noted the way in which Beuys incorporates contemporary sensibility with the kind of experimentation and openness of technique and perception that are consistent with postmodern attitudes and experience. The most cursory look at Beuys's personal background does much to explain how this connection between art and life has been made. To begin with, Beuys is wholly a product of the twentieth century. Born in 1921 in Kleve (also spelled Cleves), Germany, Beuys appears to have been uniquely positioned to emerge as a social commentator. For one thing, as Marks observes, the town of Kleve is located on the brink of cultural tensionabout ten miles from the border with Holland.1 A German youthparticularly one who came of age at the time that Adolf Hitler came to

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rtistic discipline. Additionally, Kuspit notes (only to reject), certain art critics despise art as propaganda because it promises depths of perception and sensibility that the artist cannot always fulfill. In Kuspit's view, Beuys is up to the task of effective as well as affective symbology, and his startling natureladen sculptures for the most part are "restored to their primalif not immediately nameablesignificance, and so all the more primordial and charged. . . . I had a strong sense of Beuys's works as not specifically art objects, but as belonging rather in a museum of natural historymore ethnographic than 'high culture' in import."12 The hare of the Dusseldorf sculpture in this view is an emblem of nature, while the "explanation" and the "art" that is being explained in the work stands for what man hath wrought in the way of chaotic manmade progress and how the wreaking of it irresistibly tends toward the death of nature. The plastic form of the work may be seen as shocking, or as Mackintosh would have it, an instance of art in "the emotions [are] used raw."13 The integrity of the hare, and the peril of all nature in the path of man, may be turned away from; it must remain only in memory recalled only by photogr
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Approximate Word count = 3393
Approximate Pages = 14 (250 words per page)

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