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The Artistic Alchemy of Joseph Beuys – Dr David Adams

As his own original contribution, Beuys cited his "totalized," "anthropological" understanding of art-the ideas that everyone is an artist; that one can be a form-creating artist even in thinking and speaking; that art expanded to life as "social sculpture" is needed in our time; and that this creative intelligence of the people, this enlarged art, is the real capital of an economy.

Yet even here Steiner's ideas may have influenced Beuys more than Beuys consciously realized or recalled. Consider the following quotations from Steiner:

"I wanted to show that the realm otherwise dealt with only by the artist in imagination must now become the serious concern of the human race, for the reason that it represents the stage humanity must reach to lay hold upon the supersensible [beyond the senses – the spiritual world], which the brain is incapable of grasping."

"Genuine art ... is an affair of the people; genuine art is essentially social in character."

"A real permeation by social art of our community through [artistic] education would give us a true culture of the will.”

"What we must learn to do is to bring art into our thinking...."

"All real philosophers have been artists in the realm of concepts."

"The outer expression of intelligence, in this connection, is in the manifold formations of capital."

"… intelligence works in capital as inventiveness in connection with the whole social life."

Although Steiner may not always have intended precisely the same meaning as Beuys, nonetheless the similarities are striking and must have been highly suggestive to Beuys.