Joseph Beuys

Joseph Beuys is arguably the most important and most controversial German artist of the late twentieth century. This book illuminates two defining threads in Beuys's life and art: the centrality of trauma, and his sustained investigation of the very notion of art itself. Many of Beuys's artworks are autobiographical in content. His self-woven legend of rescue and redemption still strikes many as an inappropriate fantasy, located as it is in the harrowing context of the Second World War. Beuys's self-mythology confronted the post-traumatic, foregrounding his struggle for psychic recovery. This led to his efforts to extend the purview of Western art, freeing artists after him to work in a thoroughly interdisciplinary way. His notion of activism-as-art has become predominant in contemporary art of the twenty-first century. Exploring Beuys's expansive conception of art and following him into the realms of science, politics and spirituality, this book attributes extraordinary importance to Beuys's myth-making as a positive force in the post-war confrontation of Germany's past.