Film screening
Joseph Beuys: An interview

Social Sculptures

Mon, 18.10.2021
7:00 PM Goethe-Institut Nicosia

Directors: Lyn Blumenthal and Kate Horsfield | 01:01:00 min

In this interview, Beuys recounts his confused experiences as a child in interwar Germany. The contradiction between an undestroyed nature that was full of possibilities and the deeply disturbed social body of the time was an intense and formative one. He recounts, "When I was five years old, I felt that my life had to end because I had already experienced too much of this contradiction." Beuys used his increasing ability to analyse the contradictions he felt and the urgency during the time of the Second World War to renew and reframe central questions of life, work and human freedom.

Beuys also talks about his engagement with materials, the limitations of preparing a performance and other issues important to his art practice. He repeatedly declares the urgency of an expanded understanding of art that has the radical potential to transform the social body. He captures the vital possibility of "another kind of art" in which aesthetics are meaningless except as "the human being in itself".

A historical interview originally recorded in 1980 and re-edited in 2003 with the support of the Lyn Blumenthal Memorial Fund.