Joseph Beuys’s Game-Changing Art Plants Seeds for Change Two Vast LA Projects
By Tara Anne Dalbow
“If you have all my multiples,” Joseph Beuys once said, “then you have me completely.” The polymathic German sculptor was referring to the editioned objects that bore the intellectual and emotional freight of his artistic project. Ranging from blackboard erasers to carved blocks of copper-infused beeswax, these objects were small in scale and large in edition size. Because of that, Beuys believed they could disseminate his radical notions of art as a transformational social force far and wide—even when he wasn’t present to facilitate that process.
Of the nearly 600 multiples he produced, some 400 are included in the Broad‘s forthcoming exhibition, “Joseph Beuys: In Defense of Nature,” opening November 16. Assembled in this show are found objects, sculptures, paintings, oil sketches, photographs, posters, films, and materials related to his political actions, like fliers and office supplies—a massive grouping of artworks that amount to “the whole Beuys,” as the artist himself once called his multiples.
“For him, all manner of things mattered,” said Beuys scholar Andrea Gyorody, who organized the show along with Sarah Loyer, curator and exhibition manager of the Broad. “He put great effort into enshrining simple base materials with value, preserving their longevity as art objects.”
Despite the diversity of material forms, the multiples share a conceptual concern for restoring individual wellness and transforming the conditions of social reality. Beuys once said art was “the only genuinely human medium for revolutionary change … completing the transformation from a sick world to a healthy one.” These ideas were borne out in his editions, as well as his large-scale sculptures, performances, and political actions.
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Though not featured in this exhibition or anywhere in LA, Beuys’s monumental works also continue to loom large. His 1982 piece 7000 Eichen (7000 Oaks), the most well-known of his environmental interventions, involved planting oak trees alongside basalt stone steles in Kassel, Germany. Still today, those trees provide the city’s citizens with ample shade, clean air, and an encounter with nature’s vitality.
Beuys, who died in 1986, not long after 7000 Eichen debuted at Documenta 7, hoped that future ecological initiatives would arise in the work’s wake. Indeed, they have, at institutions ranging from Tate Modern in London to the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis. And now, finally, the West Coast is getting its first-ever Beuys-like tree planting initiative at Los Angeles’s Elysian Park.
“But hopefully, not the last,” Loyer said. “Beuys said to never stop planting, and we’ve taken our inspiration from that prompt because, unfortunately, his concerns about the environment are just as relevant today as they were four decades ago.”
