French-language version

JOSEPH BEUYS : A SHAMAN'S FACTORY




Maïté Vissault
Cultural Myth, Identity, and Politics in the Postwar Period : the Case of the Reception of the Work of Joseph Beuys

Jean-Philippe Antoine
Joseph Beuys : Antimyth ?

PREVIOUS LETTER THE INFLUENCE OF THE SAINT-SIMONIANS AND THE IDEA OF ART IN THE AVANGUARD OF THE SOCIAL REFORM BODY MORALITY DANDIES The Model Child The beautiful and the useful New Publics, Between Utopia and Marketing Photographs by amateurs the market, at the start art in the republic the voyage of the avant-gardes Major exhibitions WHAT IS SOCIAL ART ? PRIMITIVISMS realisms

 

EDITORIAL

  
        
        In a Germany exiting from Nazism, Joseph Beuys was effectively able to capture the attention of the public and the media by going back over the recent catastrophe. His spectacular return upon these events has meaning only when one recalls the violent world in which he had himself participated. Indeed, he set out to resurrect the German artistic and political scene by identifying with the figure of Christ in a process of atonement that, according to a hijacked Romantic tradition, confided upon the artist a sacred mission.
        Everyone will see in this effort what he wants to see therein. For his loyal supporters, it marks the sincere mourning process of a German who had fought in the Wehrmacht, a contemporary magus and guardian of a higher knowledge, an enemy of the materialism of capitalist society, and a great teacher driven by a spirit of provocation who was able to reinvent his own history for others’ use. For his critics, this effort constitutes the wily construction of an advantageous new national identity just as Germany was wiping out Nazi history with the economic miracle of the Federal Republic, as well as the birth of a new type of political artist-guru who assiduously enlists his public through the use of hackneyed archetypes: from native soil to the Germanic language--extended to the Celtic family--the only one endowed with the power of regeneration. In other words, Beuys is the author of a symptomatic work, one born of a wartime traumatism and of a national-Romantic ideology that fails to free itself from its own heroic particularism.
        These two positions are represented here: the latter by Maïté Vissault, author of an excellent dissertation that is forthcoming on La problématique de l’identité allemande à travers la réception de l’oeuvre de Joseph Beuys (The problematic of German identity examined through the reception of Joseph Beuys’s work); the former by Jean-Philippe Antoine, whose work on Beuys will soon be published.
        Their respective points of view are practically irreconcilable, so much do the methods of analysis diverge, thereby bringing out major conceptual differences about art and its function in society.