Joseph Beuys, Myth, Politics, and the Limits of Art’s Reach
A new book by Daniel Spaulding reopens one of postwar Germany’s most consequential artistic careers, and it does so with unusual skepticism. Spaulding, an assistant professor of Modern and contemporary art at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, argues that Joseph Beuys (1921-86) was not only a major German artist but also a master builder of his own legend — one who pushed art toward politics, economics, and public life with near-total conviction.
Beuys emerged in West Germany as a countercultural figure at a moment when younger Germans were questioning the moral authority of the postwar establishment. He made works from fat, felt, and other base materials, staged performances with dead animals, and helped found the Green Party. His influence has remained durable in the market, even as critical opinion has never settled around him.
Spaulding’s central argument turns on “economimesis,” a concept he develops through Jacques Derrida and traces back to Immanuel Kant. In Spaulding’s reading, Beuys tried to erase the boundary between art making and collective existence, imagining art as a force capable of remaking society itself. That ambition, Spaulding writes, was “tremendously ambitious, perhaps to the point of megalomania.”
The book is especially attentive to the gap between Beuys’s claims and the evidence around them. It returns to La Rivoluzione Siamo Noi, the 1972 tinted photograph that helped fix Beuys’s public image: hat, hunting vest, boots, and a bag slung over one shoulder, striding forward like a political prophet. The image, Spaulding suggests, is inseparable from the artist’s mythmaking.
That tension is even clearer in I Like America and America Likes Me, the 1974 performance in New York in which Beuys spent eight hours a day for three days in an enclosed gallery space with a coyote, straw, felt, a cane, and copies of the Wall Street Journal. The work has become one of the defining images of performance art in the 20th century, but Spaulding treats it less as a triumph than as a carefully staged microcosm in which art briefly claimed its own rules.
Spaulding also revisits Honigpumpe am Arbeitsplatz, shown at documenta 6 in Kassel in 1977, and the wartime rescue story from Crimea that has long surrounded Beuys. That story, once central to his self-presentation, is now widely doubted. In Spaulding’s hands, the doubt matters: it reveals how thoroughly Beuys’s art depended on narrative, and how much of his authority came from the force of that narrative itself.
For all the theory, the book’s larger question is plain. What happens when an artist insists that art can absorb politics, economics, and social life at once? Beuys made that proposition central to his career. Spaulding asks whether it was ever truly possible.
