ABSTRACT
On 20 July, 1964, Joseph Beuys published Lebenslauf/Werklauf (Life Course/Work Course), a ‘fictional’ biography fusing artistic and personal aspects of his life in ways that would serve as a founding document defining his subsequent aesthetic and political persona. The first entry in the Lebenslauf/Werklauf register, dated 1921, reads ‘Kleve Exhibition of a wound drawn together with plaster’ (cited in Rosenthal, 2004, p. 159). The reference draws attention to the Northwest German border town where Beuys spent his childhood, as well as the circumstance of his birth. Further down, the register for the year 1964 reveals: ‘Beuys recommends that the Berlin Wall be heightened by 5 cm (better proportions!)’ (ibid.). The humour here is both personal and political. For, spiralling outwards from Lebenslauf/Werklauf catalogue to the many sculptures, action-performances, vitrines, multiples, phantasmagoria and environments that informed Beuys’ lifelong oeuvre, the reader is struck by similar references to wounds, sutures, borders, divisions, fissures and frontiers of all kinds, often transposing bodily references to those indexing vaster geopolitical alignments: the artificial split between animals and humans; the tyrannical rending of gender; the existential division of the two Germanys; the destructive separation between an over-industrialized West and a ‘mythical’ Eurasian continent, site of putatively untainted spiritual and creative values. In each of his actions, and as foreshadowed in his Berlin Wall remark, Beuys attempted to illuminate how through art all things are conceivable, all fixed and frozen structures can be ‘healed’, set in motion and given life-like force so as to defuse the conditions that led to their initial freezing. This gesture would in turn be in line with Beuys admiration for a ‘crazy creativity’ in art whose political analogue would be revealed through his instrumental role in founding ‘counter-institutional’ sites such as the German Green Party, as well as parallel interventions in direct democracy (‘Office for Direct Democracy through Referendum’ 1 ), the latter an activist organization calling for people’s referenda as a way to re-democratize German society (Mesch, 2007).
