Social Sculpture
What pumping honey through a museum can teach us about public life
Friends,
A few weeks ago, we looked at Project Row Houses, Rick Lowes’ creative and social experiment of developing dilapidated homes into art studios. He was deeply inspired by Joseph Beuys, the German artist and provocateur who coined the term “social sculpture,” and I thought it would be fun to go upstream and hear from the German artist himself.
Here’s Beuys: “Every sphere of human activity, even peeling a potato can be a work of art as long as it is a conscious act.” Why stop at the museum? For Beuys, anything can be a work of art and anyone can be an artist—and that means you and me! Instead of seeing art only as an aesthetic enterprise, Beuys was convinced art could be a social and political enterprise too. That sculpture didn’t just mean what we carve into stone; sculpture could also be the beautiful ways that we gather and shape our own social lives: “Social organism as a work of art.” You can see why Rick Lowe likes him so much.
One work that really expresses this is “Honigpumpe am Arbeitsplatz” (Honeypump in the Workplace), an artwork that was both social and sculptural at the same time. For 100 days at Documenta 6 in Kassel, Germany, Beuys gave ongoing lectures and workshops for attendees on social and political ideas while honey was literally pumping through rubber veins throughout the museum. Through teaching and sculpture, Beuys was pushing people to imagine new social possibilities, pumping new ideas through an art institution like a brand new circulatory system.
There’s so much I like about this. But the main thing is how this artwork helps us imagine how we’re not isolated individuals but instead deeply connected and intertwined in social ways, too. It reminds me of the Buddhist idea of the dharma body or how Catholic mystics like Hildegard von Bingen imagined people as individual bodies inside the larger body of Christ. The point is this: we’re not isolated selves, floating around in empty space—we’re embedded in much larger living organisms. Organisms that sometimes need renewal and rebirth.
Below you’ll find a selection from Beuys’ manifesto on social sculpture. Half a century later, his words seem just as provocative now and push us to the same questions he was asking then: How do we imagine life together? What do our institutions need for renewal? How can the arts help us build a better tomorrow?
Take care,
Michael
“I Am Searching for Field Character” by Joseph Beuys (1973)
Only on condition of a radical widening of definition will it be possible for art and activities related to art to provide evidence that art is now the only evolutionary-revolutionary power. Only art is capable of dismantling the repressive effects of a senile social system that continues to totter along the deathline: to dismantle in order to build A SOCIAL ORGANISM AS A WORK OF ART.
This most modern art discipline – Social Sculpture/Social Architecture – will only reach fruition when every living person becomes a creator, a sculptor or architect of the social organism. Only then would the insistence on participation of the action art of Fluxus and Happenings be fulfilled; only then would democracy be fully realized. Only a conception of art revolutionized to this degree can turn into a politically productive force, coursing through each person and shaping history.
But all this, and much that is as yet unexplored, has first to form part of our consciousness: insight is needed into objective connections. We must probe (theory of knowledge) the moment of origin of free individual productive potency (creativity). We then reach the threshold where the human being experiences himself primarily as a spiritual being, where his supreme achievements (work of art), his active thinking, his active feeling, his active will, and their higher forms, can be apprehended as sculptural generative means, corresponding to the exploded concepts of sculpture divided into its elements – indefinite – movement – definite (see theory of sculpture), and are then recognized as flowing in the direction that is shaping the content of the world right through into the future.
This is the concept of art that carries within itself not only the revolutionizing of the historic bourgeois concept of knowledge (materialism, positivism), but also of religious activity. EVERY HUMAN BEING IS AN ARTIST who – from his state of freedom – the position of freedom that he experiences at first hand – learns to determine the other positions in the TOTAL ARTWORK OF THE FUTURE SOCIAL ORDER….
“A House Called Tomorrow” by Alberto Ríos
You are not fifteen, or twelve, or seventeen—
You are a hundred wild centuries
And fifteen, bringing with you
In every breath and in every step
Everyone who has come before you,
All the yous that you have been,
The mothers of your mother,
The fathers of your father.
If someone in your family tree was trouble,
A hundred were not:
The bad do not win—not finally,
No matter how loud they are.
We simply would not be here
If that were so.
You are made, fundamentally, from the good.
With this knowledge, you never march alone.
You are the breaking news of the century.
You are the good who has come forward
Through it all, even if so many days
Feel otherwise. But think:
When you as a child learned to speak,
It’s not that you didn’t know words—
It’s that, from the centuries, you knew so many,
And it’s hard to choose the words that will be your own.
From those centuries we human beings bring with us
The simple solutions and songs,
The river bridges and star charts and song harmonies
All in service to a simple idea:
That we can make a house called tomorrow.
What we bring, finally, into the new day, every day,
Is ourselves. And that’s all we need
To start. That’s everything we require to keep going.
Look back only for as long as you must,
Then go forward into the history you will make.
Be good, then better. Write books. Cure disease.
Make us proud. Make yourself proud.
And those who came before you? When you hear thunder,
Hear it as their applause.Weaving abstraction in ancient and modern art
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That poems, though! "You are a hundred wild centuries ..."
and ...
"What we bring, finally, into the new day, every day,
Is ourselves. And that’s all we need
To start. That’s everything we require to keep going."
That's a wonderful thing to hear on a drizzly Monday morning, thank you!