Joseph Beuys Manresa

The first performances by Joseph Beuys were a radical turning point for twentieth-century art. Beuys saw art as a transformative action that is both personal and communal, and his expanded artistic practice engaged spirituality, personal mythology, political structures, and symbolic materials. For Manresa, one of his legendary performance actions, which took place on December 15, 1966 in Düsseldorf, he collaborated with the Danish artists Henning Christiansen and Björn Nörgaard. In 1994 those two artists performed a new version of the piece as Manresa Hauptbahnhof. The performance was carried out in Manresa, the city that both gave the name to the original action and also was where Saint Ignatius Loyola had the revelations that led him to write his Spiritual Exercises, which Beuys considered essential reading. This book, marking the centenary of the artist's birth, presents never-before-seen materials from the two performances, including texts, images, scripts, and preparatory drawings, and contributions from scholars and critics offer further insight. Friedhelm Mennekes, an art critic and Jesuit priest, analyses the Ignatian imprint in Beuys's work while explaining its spiritual complexity, looking beyond the popular vision of the artist as shaman. Pilar Parcerisas examines Beuys's spiritual geography, explaining the importance the town of Manresa within it while also laying out the physical and mystical coordinates of Eurasia, a site that was always present in Beuys's work. While reviewing the features of Manresa, Klaus-D. Pohl also addresses the paradoxical union between Beuys's mysticism and the neo-Dadaists of Fluxus. Beuys's collaborator Björn Nörgaard recalls his time working with the German artist and reflects on the paths he opened up. Finally, art historian Harald Szeemann considers the possibility of liberating politics through spirituality.

This book explores how four contemporary artists—Francis Bacon, Joseph Beuys, Robert Gober, and Damien Hirst—pursue the question of death through their fraught appropriations of Christian imagery. Each artist is shown to not only pose provocative theological questions, but also to question the abilities of theological speech to adequately address current attitudes to death. When set within a broader theological context around the thought of death, Bacon’s works invite fresh readings of the New Testament’s narration of the betrayal of Christ, and Beuys’ works can be appreciated for the ways they evoke Resurrection to envision possible futures for Germany in the aftermath of war. Gober’s immaculate sculptures and installations serve to create alternative religious environments, and these places are both evocative of his Roman Catholic upbringing and virtually haunted by the ghosts of his excommunication from that past. Lastly and perhaps most problematically, Hirst has built his brand as an artist from making jokes about death. By opening fresh arenas of dialogue and meaning-making in our society and culture today, the rich humanity of these artworks promises both renewed depths of meaning regarding our exit from this world as well as how we might live well within it for the time that we have. As such, it will be a vital resource for all scholars in Theology, the Visual Arts, Material Religion and Religious Studies.

Joseph Beuys performed one of his most radical pieces, the Action MANRESA, on 15 December 1966, at the Galerie Schmela in Düsseldorf. He was accompanied by Henning Christiansen and Bjørn Nørgaard. In 1994 these two Danish artists gave continuity to the original piece with the performance Manresa Hauptbahnhof (Manresa, Central Station), which was done in the very city that had given name to the earlier Beuys action. That same city was where in 1522 Saint Ignatius of Loyola had the revelations that led him to write the Spiritual Exercises, a text that wielded a powerful influence on the German artist. This book brings together for the first time all the material related to that second performance (including images, scripts and preparatory drawings), as well as a selection of critical texts that situate the action within its European context. Friedhelm Mennekes, an expert in contemporary art and a Jesuit priest, analyses the action by delving into its spiritual meaning, exploring the symbolism of the objects employed. The metaphor of the central station enables art critic Pilar Parcerisas to discover the city of reference and redraw the map of Europe, with unexpected connections between Manresa and Copenhagen. In the final essay, academic Peter van der Meijden, a specialist in the actions of these Danish artists, contextualises the two performances, which represented a meeting place for very different artistic personalities working on the cutting edge in creating a completely new kind of art.

During the 1970s, the German sculptor Joseph Beuys made a number of trips to Ireland and Scotland. This interdisciplinary study of the artist's work in the "Celtic world" assesses whether the practice shown or developed during these visits could be seen, in any sense, as a language practice - more specifically, as a "language of healing" - and whether Beuys could be said to have interpreted and performed notions of "Celticity" in these places. The book reflects on the anthropological aspect of Beuys' work and includes interview material with artists who worked with or met him during this time. (Series: European Studies in Culture and Policy - Vol. 10)

Joseph Beuys is one of the most important and controversial German artists of the late twentieth century, an artist whose persona and art is so tightly interwoven with Germany’s fascist past—Beuys was, after all, a former soldier in the Third Reich—that he has been a problematic figure for postwar and post-reunification Germany. In illuminating the centrality of trauma and the sustained investigation of the notion of art as the two defining threads in Beuys's life and art, this book offers a critical biography that deepens our understanding of his many works and their contribution. Claudia Mesch analyzes the aspects of Beuys’s works that have most offended audiences, especially the self-woven legend of redemption that many have felt was a dubious and inappropriate fantasy for a former Nazi soldier to engage. As she argues, however, Beuys’s self-mythology confronted post-traumatic life head on, foregrounding a struggle for psychic recovery. Following Beuys’s exhibitions in the 1970s, she traces how he both expanded the art world beyond the established regional centers and paved the way for future artists interested in activism-as-art. Exploring Beuys’s expansive conceptions of what art is and following him into the realms of science, politics, and spirituality, Mesch ultimately demonstrates the ways that his own myth-making acted as a positive force in the Germany’s postwar reckoning with its past.

Vitrines and glass cabinets are familiar apparatuses that have in large part defined modern modes of display and visibility, both within and beyond the museum. They separate objects from their contexts, group them with other objects, both similar and dissimilar, and often serve to reinforce their intrinsic or aesthetic values. The vitrine has much in common with the picture frame, the plinth and the gallery, but it has not yet received the kind of detailed art historical and theoretical discussion that has been brought to these other modes of formal display. The twelve contributions to this volume examine some of the points of origin of the vitrine and the various relations it brokers with sculpture, first in the Wunderkammer and cabinet of curiosities and then in dialog with the development of glazed architecture beginning with Paxton's Crystal Palace (1851). The collection offers close discussions of the role of the vitrine and shop window in the rise of commodity culture and their apposition with Constructivist design in the work of Frederick Kiesler; as well as original readings of the use of vitrines in Surrealism and Fluxus, and in work by Joseph Beuys, Paul Thek, Claes Oldenburg and his collaborators, Jeff Koons, Mike Kelley, Dan Graham, Vito Acconci, Damien Hirst and Josephine Meckseper, among others. Sculpture and the Vitrine also raises key questions about the nature and implications of vitrinous space, including its fronts onto desire and the spectacle; transparency and legibility; and onto ideas and practices associated with the archive: collecting, preserving and ordering.

In 13 Kapiteln bieten die Ausstellung und der dazugehörige Katalog einen tiefgreifenden Einblick in das kosmopolitische Denken von Joseph Beuys, wie es sich in seinen Aktionen manifestiert, die in Form von Videoprojektionen und Fotografien präsentiert werden. Denn dort – als handelnde, sprechende und sich bewegende Figur – untersuchte Beuys die zentrale und radikale Idee seines erweiterten Kunstbegriffs: »Jeder Mensch ist ein Künstler«. Das Ziel seines universalistischen Ansatzes war es, die Gesellschaft von Grund auf zu erneuern. Bis heute ist sein Einfluss in künstlerischen und politischen Diskursen spürbar. In der Ausstellung treten zeitgenössische Künstler*innen neben Vertreter*innen aus den unterschiedlichsten Bereichen der Gesellschaft mit dem agierenden Beuys in einen vielschichtigen, transkulturellen Dialog. Von heute aus bestätigen, befragen und erweitern sie seine Thesen zu den Möglichkeiten einer von der Kunst her gedachten Zukunft. MIT POSITIONEN VON B-Town Warriors, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Phyllida Barlow, Nelly Ben Hayoun-Stépanian, Fatou Bensouda, Huma Bhabha, Dineo Seshee Bopape, Angela Davis, Dusadee Huntrakul, Jes Fan, Charles Foster, Bill Gates, Núria Güell, Anna Halprin, Donna Haraway, Raphael Hillebrand, Jenny Holzer, Michel Houellebecq, Lazar Kunstmann | L’ux, Jeong Kwan, Mierle Laderman Ukeles, Zoe Leonard, Goshka Macuga, Antanas Mockus, Baptiste Morizot, Bruce Nauman, Tuan Andrew Nguyen, Sister Rosemary Nyirumbe, Howey Ou, William Pope.L, Cia Rinne, Tejal Shah, Vandana Shiva, Santiago Sierra, Patti Smith, Edward Snowdon, Christopher D. Stone, Suzanne Lacy, The Otolith Group, Thich Nhat Hanh, Greta Thunberg, Malala Yousafzai, u.a.

Myths are a central part of our reality. But merely debunking them lets us forget why they are created in the first place and why we need them. André Fischer draws on key examples from German postwar culture, from novelists Hans Henny Jahnn and Hubert Fichte, to sculptor and performance artist Joseph Beuys, and filmmaker Werner Herzog, to show that mythmaking is an indispensable human practice in times of crisis. Against the background of mythologies based in nineteenth-century romanticism and their ideological continuation in Nazism, fresh forms of mythmaking in the narrative, visual, and performative arts emerged as an aesthetic paradigm in postwar modernism. Boldly rewriting the cultural history of an era and setting in transition, The Aesthetics of Mythmaking in German Postwar Culture counters the predominant narrative of an exclusively rational Vergangenheitsbewältigung (“coming to terms with the past”). Far from being merely reactionary, the turn toward myth offered a dimension of existential orientation that had been neglected by other influential aesthetic paradigms of the postwar period. Fischer’s wide-ranging, transmedia account offers an inclusive perspective on myth beyond storytelling and instead develops mythopoesis as a formal strategy of modernism at large.