Beuys
Beuys
Text of the film by Werner Nekes and Dore 0. 1981 11 min. 16mm colour
The term 'visual arts' that is prevailing in modernity is really a symptom for the reduction of perceptional categories within the human creativity as a whole. An anthropological conception of art - and I have proved for instance in sculptural theory that you hear a sculpture before you see it, that consequently the auditive element is not just an equal part, but a constituent of the perception of plastic art - confronts you with the task of exploring the conception of creativity in all directions, of spreading it out and substantiating it anthropologically. So for instance, the human creativity potential as a whole doesn't only comprise the recognition criteria in thought, but it also comprises the sensational categories in the middle of the soul, that is, the moving element, and it positively comprises the will potential in human will. It is this interpretation of human creativity potential, beginning with the triple position, the connections of will, sense, and thought categories, which will get you to the more differentiated position of considering the perception, too, and thus the connection of human senses, discovering that for example seeing, the visual sense, the auditory sense, the static sense, the architectonic sense, the haptic sense, can be thought forward into the sense of feeling, the sense of will, the sense of thinking, and many other still to be developed senses.
This means: Man in his creative potential is a developing being, and in the next cultural epoch, which is what we are trying to reach and where the conception of self-determination of man in all positions of work can lead to free development of human activities, we shall be confronted with the possibility to develop new sensory organs, new qualities of creativity in the given entities of will potential, potential of feeling, and thus potential of movement and an intellectual sense of form and thought. So, when I chose primordial materials, such as fat, felt, or copper, I could, to a certain extent, anticipate, that such materials would have a provocative effect in the time I'm living in, which means they would provoke questions for reason and purpose. So these materials were not chosen to do again what has been done already by Duchamp, that is, to exercise in a way a revolution in the museum without acting accordingly with regard to the conception of capital. I could not afford that; those materials, however, have proved to be adequate, with regard to fat, to will potential, with regard to copper, to the element of movement, and with regard to felt, to the isolating, analytical characteristics in thought. So, the sculptural theory contains the possibility to orientate the entire social organism to a new level, and thus to a new height, and thus to a future human culture, and simultaneously to systematically state the measures that should be taken to get from the given to a future form. 'To get back to the willing, which is a completely neglected category in science of creativity: we also have to deal with the conception of warmth, which I have quite often brought up in sculptural theory as a possibility to really hatch the future in this element of warmth or will as in an - I might say - aesthetic willing. It has become obvious, however, that this hatching process may indeed begin in a chaos of warmth, but that it does require strategy and tactics to lead to future possibilities of man; this has also been shown by the critical reproaches against an attempt like that, which made it necessary for the author to give accordingly deep reasons. That this whole approach, that this whole approach, that this whole approach .......
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