Joseph Beuys

JOSEPH BEUYS

Joseph Beuys marks a central historical transition from sculpture as object toward sculpture as process, energy, temporal transformation and social relation. Traditional sculpture assumes: artist → shapes material → produces object. Beuys expands the question: what else can be sculpted? Material, energy, time, attention, education, political relations and social organisation can all become fields of transformation. This is the expanded concept of art, a historically Beuys-associated formulation, not a claim that every activity is automatically art.

His Plastische Theorie / sculptural theory is less a recipe for a finished form than a dynamic account of transitions between states. Polarities such as cold ↔ warm, stillness ↔ movement, solidity ↔ softness, chaos ↔ order and reason ↔ intuition organise a field in which forces act upon one another. Sculpture increasingly concerns transformation between states rather than one static final form. Beuys therefore does not only ask: what form does matter have? He asks: what forces can make matter—or society—change form? The movement is form → process → transformation.

Terminological precision matters here. Social Sculpture and the expanded concept of art are historically associated with Beuys. By contrast, ECOLOGICAL TIME / DURATION AS GROWTH and MATERIAL AS ACTIVE FORCE are analytical terms used in this Brain to interpret dimensions of his practice; they are not presented as Beuys's established phrases.

THREE DIMENSIONS OF ONE EXPANDED SCULPTURAL LOGIC

Material as active force: form changes because material has properties. Ecological time / duration as growth: form changes because living processes continue through time. Social sculpture: form changes because people and relations participate in transformation. Thus matter + time + relation become sculptural forces: sculpture of matter → sculpture of process → sculpture of time → sculpture of relation → sculpture of society.

7000 EICHEN / 7000 OAKS, 1982–1987

For Documenta 7 in Kassel, Beuys initiated the planting of 7,000 trees, each paired with a column of basalt. The project took approximately five years to complete and involved proposals and participation from residents, neighbourhood groups, schools, associations and local organisations. It is not adequately reduced to land art or to the statement “Beuys planted trees.” It simultaneously operates as ecological intervention, urban transformation, collective action, social sculpture and long-duration process.

The tree ↔ basalt pairing places radically different material temporalities together without reducing either to a symbol. A tree germinates, grows, branches, ages and dies. Basalt belongs to a geological timescale vastly exceeding ordinary human duration. Human time, tree time and geological time become a multispecies / more-than-human time. No visitor experiences the work completely: each sees one moment in an unfolding process. Traditional performance duration lasts as long as the action lasts; 7000 Oaks initiates a process whose duration exceeds the artist. Beuys died before the final tree was planted: artist's life ≠ artwork's life.

Here duration as growth is an interpretive term used in this Brain. In much performance, duration is produced through continued performer presence: body → continues → endurance creates duration. In 7000 Oaks: living organism → continues → growth creates duration. This distinguishes endurance time, in which a body persists through an imposed or chosen action, from growth time, in which a living process develops according to biological temporalities that artistic will cannot simply accelerate. The artist can plant but cannot command growth. Authorship therefore becomes initiation rather than total control: the artist creates conditions for something they cannot fully control.

TRANSMISSION, CRITICAL RE-SITUATING AND CONTEMPORARY DIALOGUE

The relation to Marina Abramović is a documented historical transmission, not a claim of simple influence. In Seven Easy Pieces (2005), Abramović re-performed Beuys's How to Explain Pictures to a Dead Hare (1965), raising questions of performance transmission, documentation, re-performance, artistic legacy and the survival of ephemeral work. The lineage is: Beuys action → documentation → Abramović re-performance → archive → MAI research → new contemporary performances. This is artistic transmission through time, not merely influence.

The 2025 project Marina Abramović & MAI in Dialogue with Joseph Beuys at Museum Schloss Moyland used the Joseph Beuys Archive, museum collection, residency, site-specific research and long-duration performance to enable contemporary artists to enter critical dialogue with Beuys. Its structure is archive → research → embodied response → new social encounter: the archive becomes active rather than memorial. This is a documented institutional dialogue; it does not mean MAI is simply “Beuysian Social Sculpture.” Existing Brain connections include [[thought:6c1bbf4e-167a-4f73-b943-35738dfdd572|Marina Abramović]], [[thought:259d2013-92a8-4f1c-ad5a-74d4aa9839ff|MARIA STAMENKOVIĆ HERRANZ — RELATIONAL ENDURANCE & REGENERATION]], [[thought:045adbdd-fa72-4669-8057-5ce29a77c132|RUBIANE MAIA — MORE-THAN-HUMAN CO-CREATION]], [[thought:548edc9e-9827-4c5b-8324-0090dacd0262|ARCHIVE / REPERTOIRE / EMBODIED KNOWLEDGE]], [[thought:aba0168d-3eea-4b22-8f43-2bc0a10649f6|GINA PANE]] and [[thought:3a356501-de6d-45a1-a5d4-f2a11669914c|PRESENCE, MEDIATION & REPERFORMANCE]].

Maria Stamenković Herranz's The Painted Heron (2025), in MAI in dialogue with Beuys, gives the ecological-duration genealogy a decisive transformation. She undertook a seven-day journey from Novi Sad toward Museum Schloss Moyland carrying a living sunflower, exposing it to weather, movement, borders, transport, human care and time, before replanting it behind the museum. Beuys: planting as artistic action → 7000 Oaks → ecological / social duration. Stamenković: carrying a living organism → relational endurance → replanting → care → regeneration. She does not merely repeat Beuys: the performer becomes temporary caretaker of another living temporality. Duration as growth → duration as responsibility for growth. Her use of fallow / barbecho treats land left uncultivated for fertility to regenerate as an artistic challenge to constant activity, output and productivity: pause can become a condition of continuation.

The connection to SOLO : VOODOO CHILD is secondary here and is a conceptual resonance, not a claim that the Solo uses ecological duration. Its explicit endangered-human-species, denial-of-nature and animist concerns may open a question about Beuys's attempt to unsettle the separation between human culture and ecological process; the stronger connection belongs under [[thought:9d0fdeda-ea4c-4ecc-a60e-8c33a5ff11c3|MATERIAL AS ACTIVE FORCE]].

CRITICAL COUNTERWEIGHT

Beuys must not be mythologised uncritically. Contemporary scholarship and Museum Schloss Moyland have re-examined his role during National Socialism, postwar self-mythology, use of shamanic / Indigenous references and the universalism of some claims. The famous Tatar rescue story should be treated as Beuys's self-mythologising narrative, not as verified biography. His self-styled shamanic / Eurasian mythology must be distinguished from contemporary animist, more-than-human and decolonial practices. We do not have to inherit the myth in order to inherit the question. The useful inheritance is not imitation of a shaman persona, but the question of how material, body, animal, sound and object can enter relations exceeding purely human rational control. Rubiane Maia provides an important corrective: universal transformative energy → situated, historical, decolonial relation.

BEUYS → MAI → MY PRACTICE

Beuys → material can transform → time can become sculptural → social relation can become sculptural → Abramović re-performs Beuys → performance legacy becomes embodied transmission → MAI in dialogue with Beuys → contemporary artists reactivate, critique and transform his questions → Rubiane Maia shifts energy toward more-than-human / decolonial relation → Maria Stamenković shifts duration toward care for another living temporality → SOLO : VOODOO CHILD brings matter + sound + gesture + body + ritual into a transformative field.

The final question is: what if the artist does not give meaning to passive matter? What if art begins when matter changes, time acts, bodies respond and relations transform?