Joseph Beuys was the most influential artist of the 20th century

Joseph Beuys was full of contradictions in his art and life. Born in Krefeld, Germany, in 1921, he joined the Hitler Youth a few months before it was compulsory to join. At 18 he worked in a circus and two years later he volunteered for the Luftwaffe. After serving on the front lines on the wrong side of history, he developed a public image as a German healer known as the “Shaman.” He died young at the age of 64, considered a left-wing radical, even a naive utopian artist, and a founding member of the first Green Party. He helped Germany usher in revitalize culture (“Culture of Remembrance”), and was called “the first artist to explore the history of fascism” by art historian Benjamin Buchloh. Beuys was a Nazi who then established himself as a therapist, taking the phrase “I tolerate the masses” to its absolute extreme.

Beuys never apologized, never took responsibility, or even explained his role in the Nazi annihilation. Several of the works he created around this theme have an unsettling ambiguity. His only public war memorial, Monument to the World’s Victims war (1958-59) is an unsettling shape – a cross – and its title is also very ambiguous. Although he avoided talking about the Holocaust, he was outspoken when it came to more pleasant topics, prone to hippie slogans. “Everyone is an artist” is his most famous line. For the keen-eyed Beuys, this meant that everything could be art and, in turn, could reshape society.

In hindsight, his utopianism clearly failed—at least if we take him at his word. But a compelling new book by art historian Daniel Spaulding—Joseph Beuys and History, The first English-language feature study suggests we shouldn’t do this, instead suggesting he should be viewed as acting maliciously.

For Spaulding, “the question Beuys made the unbearable worth confronting; his life and art became a synecdoche for the failure of modernism and the struggles that followed. Spaulding wrote, “Although sometimes thought of as a man, Beuys was no fool.” His sculptures, like his figures, take on multiple, contradictory meanings. Flow and stillness occur simultaneously in sculptures that Beuys calls “batteries,” such as the work of Dia Beacon Fondoku III/3 (1979) – Copper sheets placed on piles of felt. Copper conducts energy and felt creates heat through insulation, but it also blocks electrical current. The work is always material, but also metaphorical – Beuys’ signature. Trauma and healing recur in the form of lard, dating back to Beuys’s most brilliant self-mythologizing: as his fable goes, after a wartime plane crash in the Crimea, Tatar nomads encased him in fat and used their senses to keep him alive. Here, care is born out of the wreckage, even the wreckage of war, his life sustained by the fat of bodies that might have been animals, now dead and dismembered.

Some of Beuys’s dialectics are more disturbing. Utopia meets dystopia, as Germany’s past (the Holocaust) collides with its idealized future, the “liberal democratic socialism” envisioned by Beuys. He believed that it was impossible and necessary for artists to speak about the horrors of modernity embodied by the Holocaust. But as Beuys said, Auschwitz “could never be represented in images,” so he offered positive counter-images.

A case in point is his 1979 Guggenheim retrospective, which he described as an image of contemporary capitalism and a vision of the world to come. He says utopia, but we see carnage, at least toward the end of the show when he shows a pile of felt suits followed by a rusty railing, tram stop (1961-76), and then a giant lump of fat, like the remnants of a pile of corpses at the end of a train line.

Here, Spaulding offers an explanation, saying “should “Disgusting”: Beuys’s doubling exposes the Holocaust as a logical extension of capitalist modernity – the West’s attempt to organize the world into a hierarchy that spares no expense, even human bodies. If this sounds like a heated ambiguity, it should be: Spaulding calls it perhaps Beuys’s most outrageous proposition. If it sounds like a metaphor, it’s also material: economic miracle It is no exaggeration to say that the economic miracle (“economic miracle”) of the 1950s had its origins in genocide.

All doublings make Beuys is a difficult man number. It’s unclear how intentional this all is: is his role as healer a clever conceptual act, or evidence of his repression and self-deception? Probably both; Spaulding did not—and probably could not—parse the question. Instead, he focused on doubling Do. Well-intentioned, Beuys’s avoidance of ambiguity risks hindering rather than enabling an honest reckoning with the past, both Germany’s and his own. But it also does other things. Spaulding’s book centers on Beuys’s “economics,” a term borrowed from Derrida to describe how his work mimics capital in order to critique it. After all, capital is an abstract concept that mediates all social relations. Beuys believed that art could do the same, and better. He did the work to try to prove it.

While his contemporaries, such as Andy Warhol, used commodities and readymades as metonyms for capitalism, Beuys focused on capitalism as a system and used money as an intermediary, signing and writing “art=capital” (“art=capital”) on banknotes. The postmodernism of Warhol’s Factory was nihilistic, but Beuys’s PoMo held both hope and fear, distinguishing between irreconcilable, contradictory meaning and utter meaninglessness.

But why money? During Beuys’s life, society was reshaped many times through economic intervention. The Nazis took advantage of the economic crisis to further promote fascism. Soon Germany was divided along capitalist and communist lines. Then a new currency—the German mark—upended life again, draining personal savings while flooding stores with new goods. By the early 1970s, Nixon had ended the system of gold-backed global currencies and reimagined the meaning and materials of money—sounds a bit like sculpture, doesn’t it? Boyce thought so. Turning banknotes into works of art increases their value and proves his insightful point.

According to Karl Marx, when both capital and art give meaning to material things, meaning-making in capitalism is always dual or divisive. Objects have use value and immaterial value, and material reality is intertwined with emotional attachment and symbolic meaning. Spaulding believes that Beuys’s meaning is similarly divided. Think of his batteries, his fat, his Guggenheim installation.

Beuys was fascinated By totalizing systems—not just art and capital, but nature as well. Spaulding considered him “the first artist… to make environmental concerns an integral part of his practice” and described I like America and America likes me (1974) as a small-scale ecosystem: Over the course of three days, two species, a human (Boyce) and a coyote, lived in a closed room augmented by inputs such as straw, felt, food and water, and outputs such as feces and symbolism.

Spaulding devotes much of the book to Beuys’s ecological installation Honigpumpe am Arbeitsplatz (Honey pump in the workplace)in 1977, proposed a model society inspired by bees. It was installed only once, at Documenta 6; later, at the Guggenheim Museum, its components were decommissioned and displayed above ground. In Kassel, a pump circulates honey through plastic tubes that snake around the Friedrich Museum. Boyce compared this honey to blood, but also to money: a substance that circulates to keep a body or economy alive.

Boyce, who survived a heart attack two years ago, described the pump as both a heart and a central bank. Money was once a universal means of exchange, but now it flows through central institutions that issue it in immaterial forms such as credit and debt, he said. Honey promised something better: sweet food produced by and for the collective.

Spaulding’s criticism Honig pump‘s utopianism, which compares unfavorably to Pasolini’s sadomasochistic anti-fascist films Salo (1975). Spaulding believed that Pasolini’s notorious coprophagia disrupted the normal flow of biological systems that represented social systems. In other words, shit-eating exchanges automaticity for autonomy and provides a way out. Honig pump Only closed loops are available.

But given its viscosity, wouldn’t honey be more likely to clog the system? It is unclear from the photo whether this took place at Documenta 6, and few critics commented on Beuys’s installation at the time. But try drinking honey through a straw; it’s not easy. Beuys may have said, “The honey flows,” but shouldn’t we take his words with a grain of salt? After all, he also claimed that his felt-copper works were batteries for conducting spiritual energy.

According to its leading theorist Julia Kristeva, abjection is anything that disrupts boundaries, systems, or rules—which is why for Spaulding, through Derrida, it is a form of freedom. In Beuys’s world, this freedom is crucial: the Holocaust epitomizes modernism’s abject failure to systematize human nature, while art proves that we can shape the world and act freely. Sticky stuff is notoriously difficult to neatly contain and systematize. While Spaulding points out that honey is the bee’s regurgitation, he ignores its other, more disturbing quality: Honey is a natural antibiotic that combines death and healing into one.

What about the queen bee? Spaulding dismissed her; but Beuys had made a wax figure in her image, at least roughly, as early as 1952. The Queen poses the question: Is the Beehive a worker’s utopia, or a dictatorship? A twofold factor: Beuys’s critics pointed to echoes of Nazism, pointing to his rhetoric rather than his work. The charge hinges on Beuys’s language of “social sculpture,” which bears an unsettling resemblance to Hitler’s propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels’ assertion that “the statesman is also an artist. To him the people are but stones to the sculptor.” But the comparison is untenable—one version is fascist (the Führer shapes the people), the other communalist (the people shape themselves). Which one is for the bees? Probably neither, since both “queen” and “hive mind” are metaphors for humanity.

Spaulding relies on the metaphor of the apiary, drawing heavily on textual sources from the likes of Marx and Warhol. This move privileges language over material—a common academic habit, albeit a surprising choice given the book’s fascinating account of the dissonance between metaphor and material under capitalism and the burden of comparing Beuys’s work to his language. Of course, this is more difficult to do with works where the author is unlikely to see the installation, but is still worth considering, Honig pumpBeuys was smarter than he looked; after all, Spaulding convincingly argued that we read him in such a way that we “take[his]metaphors literally.”

Nonetheless, Spaulding is right to conclude that Beuys exposed painful existential and political problems as a first step toward solving them. He is right to lament that since Beuys’s death this thorny territory has been “largely abandoned rather than solved.” Social practice and relational aesthetics, he writes, offer a concise and sanitized version of Beuys’s legacy, paying careful attention to solutions in an attempt to avoid his failures and complications.

Any art history book that defends a morally compromised dead white man, let alone a former Nazi, is destined to become obsolete. However, time Joseph Beuys and History Sadly, this is appropriate, because it forces readers who scoffed at Beuys to look at themselves: What is you As fascism returns and climate collapses, what now? Beuys is shown to be a failure, but his combination of incompetence and righteousness – however extreme and cringe-worthy – is also relatable. One could only wish that the contrast between his time and ours had been more stark.