we go this way

joseph beuys b. MAY 12 1921


During his long and productive career, Beuys helped introduce international audiences to conceptualism, concretism, Fluxus, live performance, site-specific installation and other ecological-experimental forms of art. He took up the torch of “art for the mind” from Marcel Duchamp and carried it forward, using symbolic narratives from his own survival of wartime ordeals, while radically challenging consumerist culture, materialism and instant gratification. He was an evolutionary revolutionary, teacher, funny man, shaman and poet. His message: Culture has the power to change the world (exhibit A: the 7,000 trees Beuys planted at Documenta in Kassel), and art is the only revolutionary power that can free humankind from repression.
- Valery Oisteanu

what did the possibilities for art look like to artists after picasso & duchamp had marked off their territories? after two world wars & the revelations of auschwitz et al., it must have seemed physically impossible to explore the old landscapes. beuys, broodthaers, & eventually, warhol came along to think about things & move them along, each in very different ways.

the first steps after catastrophe tend to be wobbly & either small & tenative or large & reckless. the important thing is to proceed. sometimes that's all that's left to do.