Filz tv joseph beuys biography

Introduction

During the s and s, Joseph Beuys gradually turned dialogue into a central ingredient of his art, enacting it in his aktionen (‘actions’) and offering it to his audience as a model for change. For instance, he was in Kassel every day for the duration of Documenta 5 (30 June – 8 October ), presenting his Organisation for Direct Democracy by Referendum. Nevertheless, Italian art historian Achille Bonito Oliva describes him as a ‘tribeless chief’.1 Oliva was clearly unable to group Beuys together with any kindred spirits, despite the obvious social aspect of his work. Beuys’s art was about interaction, but his motives were his own.

It is therefore relevant to explore the nature of the sociality he materialises in his work. The diversity of Beuys’s output and information available makes it necessary to narrow the focus of this article, which therefore considers his first decade as a performance artist, and especially the period –71, when Danish composer Henning Christiansen regularly made an appearance. It was also during this period that Beuys defined himself – among other things – by means of the notion (or name) of Fluxus.

By the mids, the landscape of live art, although relatively new, already encompassed anti-art demonstrations as well as events that stayed entirely within the conventions of art; collective as well as individual performances; and performances that took place among the audience as well as those that kept the divide between stage and auditorium. Where to place Beuys, a visual artist interested in creating conceptual connections, and Christiansen, a composer who strived for simplicity, remains a challenging question. In order to set the scene, this article will start by placing Beuys and Christiansen in relation to Fluxus and happenings, broadly speaking the two ’homes’ available for artists who were interested in adding an element

In the s television developed worldwide into a dominant mass media, whose opinion-forming power was sceptically faced by artists and theorists. The “one-way communication,” which forces viewers into a passive role was criticized above all. As late as , the former Federal Chancellor, Helmut Schmidt, called for a Sunday without television in order to free German television audiences from this passivity. Artists publicly took positions on the subject in radical art events. Wolf Vostell buried a television wound in barbed wire in New York (TV Burying, ) and staged a ritual shooting of a running television in Wuppertal (9-NEIN-de-coll/agen, ). Joseph Beuys covered a screen of a television set with felt (Filz-TV, ). Nam June Paik intervened in the electronics of the device itself and let viewers actively take part in the design of the image at the same time (Magnet TV, ; Participation TV, ).

Beginning in the mids, artists, writers, composers and directors started to deal with the medium of television and to search for a new visual language and narrative means. One of the most keenly experimental phases began for German television. An abundance of new aesthetic possibilities emerged with the introduction of magnetic recording, the bluebox process and chroma keying techniques that were used by many directors. A new aesthetic vision appeared in popular culture, in advertising and in television movies. Using exemplary works by individual artists, the exhibition shows a cross-section of this epoch of German television history.