Joseph Beuys: An Interview

JOSEPH BEUYS: AN INTERVIEW

A Film by Kate Horsefield and Lyn Blumenthal, colour, 55 min, USA 1980, re-edited 2003, Production: Video Data Bank, Chicago

In this interview, Beuys recounts his own tangled experiences as a child in interwar Germany. The contradiction between an undestroyed natural environment, full of possibility, and the deeply troubled social body at the time was an intense and formative one. Beuys tracks his increasing ability to analyse the contradictions he felt, and the urgency during the WWII era for renewing and re-posing questions central to the life, labour and freedom of the people.

Beuys also discusses his engagement with materials, the limits of preparation for a performance, and other issues important to his artistic practice. He continually addresses the urgency of an expanded understanding of art with the radical potential to transform the social body. He holds out the vital possibility of ‘another kind of art’ where aesthetics is meaningless except as ‘the human being in itself’.

No booking required, but registration on Goethe on Demand

Available in the Republic of Ireland from 20-24 October 2021
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