Joseph Beuys Media Archive

The Joseph Beuys Media Archive at the ZKM | Karlsruhe

In 2014, the Joseph Beuys Estate transferred the Joseph Beuys Media Archive—which contains numerous audiovisual publications and documentations of his work—to the ZKM | Karlsruhe. The goal was to preserve the image and sound recordings for the future through restoration and digitization, to make them accessible for scholarly research, and to supplement them with additional recordings. The archive was established between 1991 and 2014 at the Nationalgalerie im Hamburger Bahnhof – Museum für Gegenwart – Staatliche Museen zu Berlin under the title Joseph Beuys Media Archive.

Joseph Beuys (1921, Krefeld – 1986, Düsseldorf) is regarded as one of the most significant action and installation artists, as well as a leading figure in the performative turn—one of the groundbreaking artistic developments of the second half of the 20th century.

After World War II, Joseph Beuys studied sculpture at the State Academy of Fine Arts in Düsseldorf. In 1961, he was appointed professor and carried out his first actions.

Joseph Beuys expanded the field of sculpture to include new materials and, furthermore, made it comprehensible as a field of forces and a process. In this way, he ultimately transformed sculpture into a form of action.[1] This led him to an expanded concept of art: every human action or activity could become a sculptural—and thus artistic—form, and every person could be an artist. The artist’s monopoly as a producer of art was democratized by his anthropological concept of art, which was influenced by Rudolf Steiner’s anthroposophy.

With this expanded concept of art, Beuys universalized the idea of creation to such an extent that society itself could become creative material—a “social sculpture.” The action was not only an artistic act but also a social act, a political demonstration, and a performative lesson. Beuys demonstrated that human beings and society could be transformed through the medium of art.

By repeatedly describing art as an expression of human self-determination, Beuys drew on the legacy of Romanticism and German Idealism with regard to the function of art. This also applied to the question of the role of art after World War II. Shaped by his wartime experiences—particularly his plane crash as a pilot in the Luftwaffe in Crimea—Beuys made the wounds and trauma of war the subject of his artistic work. Following the destruction of humanism in World War II, he believed, humanity could only reorient itself through a conception of art that encompassed all human activities.

Beuys’s work also reveals a dissolution of the dialectic between science and art. He drew on pre-, para-, and anti-modern sources—alchemy, myths, shamanism, spiritualism, animism—as well as on contemporary trends in the natural sciences and technology. Peter Weibel has shown that Beuys’s work also raised questions about the understanding of modernity, which appears hybrid and contradictory in his work—not only rational but also irrational, not only sensual but also supernatural.[2]

Joseph Beuys used contemporary media such as radio and television to disseminate his ideas. This gave rise to the image of Beuys as a shaman, itinerant preacher, guru, ideologue, or public educator. However, he did not film or photograph his own work. Nevertheless, beginning in the mid-1960s, he collaborated with selected individuals to document his actions in particular through films, videos, and audio recordings.

In 2022, the DVD edition »Joseph Beuys. Aktionen 1963–1986,« edited by Peter Weibel and featuring over ten hours of audiovisual material along with a comprehensive accompanying publication, was released by Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther und Franz König. It also includes a catalog of Joseph Beuys’s audiovisual media held at the ZKM | Karlsruhe.

[1] See Peter Weibel, »Foreword,« in »Joseph Beuys. Actions 1963–1986«, ed. Peter Weibel (Cologne: Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther und Franz König, 2022), 8–63 (quotation on 56).

[2] See Weibel, 8–63 (quotation on 22–23).