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The following illustrations are details and should be acknowledged as such

p. 26 Contemplation of the smallest, 5 July r924 (detail)


p. 32 The stars and expression of love, 4 June r924 (detail)
p. 45 Physical body - Ether body, 30 December T923 (detail)
p. 49 The threefold sun, 29 October T92r (detail)
p. 50 What is thinking?, 20 April 2923 (detail)
p. 56 In the beginning there was heat, 30 June T924 (detail)
p. 65 Adam Kadmon, 30 September r922 (detail)
p. 85 Science and art, 7 December ^ 2 3 (detail)
Joseph B euys & R u d o lf Stein er

IMAGINATION
I NSPIRATION
INTUITION
Joseph Beuys installing Directiveforces (Of a new society) (Richtkrafte (Einer neuen Gesdlschaft)), 1974-77
at the Nationalgalerie im Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin, 1977
Photo: Fredrich Reinhard
Courtesy of Nationalgalerie im Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin
Joseph B eu ys & R u d o lf Stein er

IMAGINATION
I NSPIRATION
INTUITION
Edited by Allison Holland
Essays by Walter Kugler, Shelley Sacks, Wolfgang Zumdick and Tom Nicholson

[ngv National Gallery of Victoria


© National Gallery of Victoria 2007
This book is copyright. Apart from any use as permitted under the Copyright Act ig 68 , no part may be
reproduced by any process without prior written permission. Enquiries should be directed to the publisher.

Joseph Beuys works © courtesy of the artist's estate / VG BILD-KUNST, Bonn, Licensed by VISCOPY, Australia.

The National Gallery of Victoria has made every endeavour to locate the copyright holders of images
reproduced in this publication. We are grateful to the individuals and institutions who aided this task.
Any omissions are entirely unintentional, and the details should be addressed to NGV Publications.

Contributors
Allison Holland is the Curator of Prints and Drawings, National Gallery of Victoria. Walter Kugler is the
Curator at the archive of the Rudolf Steiner Nachlassverwaltung in Dornach, Switzerland. Shelley Sacks
is Director of Social Sculpture Research Unit at Oxford Brookes University, England. Wolfgang Zumdick is
an independent curator and author from Aachen, Germany. Tom Nicholson is an artist, a member of Ocular
Lab and is represented by Anna Schwartz Gallery, Melbourne.

Published by the Council of Trustees of the National Gallery of Victoria


180 St Kilda Road
Melbourne Vic. 3004
Australia

Exhibition dates: 26 October 2007 - 17 February 2008


NGV International
www.ngv.vic.gov.au

National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication data:


Holland, Allison.

Joseph Beuys & Rudolph Steiner: imagination, inspiration,


intuition.

1st ed.
ISBN 9780724102914 (pbk.).

1. Beuys, Joseph - Exhibitions. 2. Steiner, Rudolf,


1861-1925 - Exhibitions. 3. Art - 20th century -
Exhibitions. I. Beuys, Joseph. II. Steiner, Rudolf,
1861-1925. III. National Gallery of Victoria. IV. Title.

709.22

Editing: Wendy Owen


Design: Jessica Gommers
Publications Officer: Judy Shelverton
Publications & Copyright Assistant: Megan Patty
CTP and Printing: Complete Colour Printing
Cover: Rudolf Steiner, Imagination - Inspiration - Intuition, 20 March 1920
Inside Cover: Untitled (Joseph Beuys and Rudolf Steiner), 1973. Photo: Alexandra Umbreit,
© Courtesy FIU Rainer Rappmann

4
Contents

Director’s foreword p. 7

A thinking heart for the 21st century? p. 9


Ian George

Acknowledgements p. 12

Introduction p. 15
Allison Holland

A different world p. 23
The blackboard drawings of Rudolf Steiner
Walter Kugler

Seeing the phenomenon and imaginal thought p. 37


Trajectories for transformation in the work
of Joseph Beuys and Rudolf Steiner
Shelley Sacks

In us, or nowhere, is eternity p. 53


Philosophical reflections on the exhibition of blackboard
drawings by Joseph Beuys and Rudolf Steiner at the
National Gallery of Victoria
Wolfgang Zumdick

Blackboards, sounding boards p. 71


Tom Nicholson

Letter from Joseph Beuys to Manfred Schradi p. 88

An appeal to the German nation and the civilized world p. 90


Rudolf Steiner

An appeal for an alternative p. 92


Joseph Beuys

Exhibition checklist p.xoi

5
Joseph Beuys’ Action at the Institute for Contemporary Art, London, 1974
Photo: Gerald Incandela

6
Director’s foreword

Gerard Vaughan

Joseph Beuys & Rudolf Steiner: Imagination, Inspiration, Intuition is an important


exhibition that provides Australian audiences with the first opportunity to view
the blackboard drawings of Joseph Beuys and Rudolf Steiner. In its juxtaposition of
Beuys’ seminal installation of one hundred blackboards, Directive forces (Of a new
society) (Richtkrdfte (Einer neuen Gesellschaft)), with forty-two chalk drawings
by Steiner, the exhibition allows an examination of the fascinating connections
between the art of one of the twentieth century’s most significant artists and the
teachings of one of its most original thinkers.

It has taken many years to bring this exhibition to fruition. Its inception dates to
early 2000 when supporter of the arts, Ian George, contacted the Gallery regarding
the blackboard drawings of Rudolf Steiner. Ian’s perceptive understanding of these
drawings and their relationship to the art of Joseph Beuys inspired many interesting
conversations at the Gallery. From these, the concept for the current exhibition was
born, and Ian has been a constant collaborator on the project. We are indebted to him,
and to his wife Christine, for their enthusiasm and commitment to the exhibition.

This exhibition could not have been realized without the willingness of the lending
institutions to make important works available from their collections. Walter
Kugler, Curator of the archive of the Rudolf Steiner Nachlassverwaltung in Dornach,
Switzerland, was an early supporter of the exhibition and\we thank him for his
commitment. Dr Britta Schmitz, Senior Curator of the Nationalgalerie im Hamburger
Bahnhof, Berlin, responded immediately, and generously, to our request to borrow
one of her institution’s major Beuys installations for the long journey to Melbourne.
Elizabeth Ann McGregor, Director of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Sydney,
and Ron Radford, Director of the National Gallery of Australia in Canberra, have also
supported the exhibition with important loans, for which we are grateful.

Internally, this project has been led by Cathy Leahy, Senior Curator of Prints and
Drawings, and overseen since its inception by Tony Ellwood, former Deputy Director
of International Art - and, since his departure, by Frances Lindsay, Deputy Director.
Allison Holland, Curator of Prints and Drawing, has worked tirelessly in the past
year on all aspects of the realization of the exhibition and this catalogue. To these
individuals and to the staff in the Gallery’s departments of Registration, Exhibitions
Management, Publications, Graphic Design and Public Programs, thanks are due for
their commitment to bringing about this ambitious exhibition.

7
Joseph Beuys
Directive forces (Richtkrafte), 1974-77, blackboard no. 27
blackboard, chalk
N a t i o n a l g a l e r i e i m H a m b u r g e r B a h n h o f , B e rlin

8
A thinking heart for the 21st century?

Ian George

In many ways, my journey towards this exhibition began when, as a young Catholic
man growing up in rg6os Melbourne, I started questioning issues of faith and belief.
After all, we were living in a scientific age and I wanted to know, not just to believe. I
felt that if there was a divine creative being, it must be able to communicate with its
creation, or vice versa. There must be a door, and if the Church didn’t know where it
was, then I wasn’t going to hang around ... and I didn’t.

But the nagging need to know ‘the truth’ remained with me throughout my youth.
I felt that it just couldn’t be right to go through life not knowing the answers to so
many burning questions. And as I engaged with the world around me I discovered that
the social life reflected on television and in newspapers didn’t seem to fit with my
understanding of truth or freedom.

In the mid 1980s Australian architect Harry Seidler introduced me not only to modern
architecture and design, but also to the art of American Abstract Expressionists such
as Helen Frankenthaler, Mark Rothko and Robert Motherwell. Most importantly,
however, he encouraged me to look and I began to see the world in a different light.
I developed a great new interest in art, which began to speak to me, and found that I
could now have the conversations I had long yearned for with the artists whom I met.

Although I had first read a book by Rudolf Steiner when I was twenty-one, it was
twenty years later, that I picked up that thread again. I found deep satisfaction and
a sense of having found the resolution to many of my questions on reading one of
Steiner’s earliest epistemological works, The Philosophy of Freedom, 1894.1 Finally, I felt
I understood the chapter in which he refutes the contention of the eighteenth-century
philosopher, Immanuel Kant, that we can never know the thing-in-itself. The joy I felt
in this discovery was immeasurable; but how did this work in practice?

This is where my interest in Beuys enters the story. In trying to understand this
great artist and his theory of social sculpture, I came to a deeper understanding of
Steiner’s philosophical thought. Beuys’ theory of sculpture proposed that art and
life are actively balanced between the polarities of chaos and form and that it is
the heart that mediates these polarities? Thinking with the heart creates the new
consciousness that Beuys was working with and that Steiner called ‘Imagination,
Inspiration and Intuition’? Through heart thinking we can experience the truth in
a moment of intuition, for it is in this moment that truth stands within the human
being as a reality, as an objective human experience, and not as some abstract theory.4

9
Beuys articulates these ideas in Directive forces (Of a new society) (Richtkrdfte (Einer neuen
Gesellschaft)), igynt-jj where, on blackboard no. 27, the word ‘Truth’ is inscribed,
surrounded by twelve radiating lines listing twelve philosophical world views (p. 8).
To contextualize this, imagine commissioning a photographer to take photographs of a
tree from twelve different positions. Each of the twelve resulting photographs presents
a truth by itself, but none of them presents the whole truth. How can one ever know the
truth? Surely the only way is to become one with the tree, which is of course impossible;
it stands out there as object and I stand here as subject. The only way to know something
in truth is to be both subject and object at the one time, conquering the abyss identified
by Kant and bridged by Steiner. The new consciousness of Imagination, Inspiration and
Intuition is the bridge that enables the truth to be known. As part of his expanded concept
of art, Beuys famously claimed that the mysteries take place at the train station. Working
with this concept, and with the new consciousness, human beings can connect with the
non-visible world in so-called ordinary places, through a direct inner experience.

Beuys illuminated Steiner for me. Through trying to understand Beuys I came closer
to Steiner and a new world of possibilities. The mystery was resolved; I had found
the door I had been looking for. But I also realized that Beuys could not be fully
understood without knowledge of Steiner’s epistemology and Anthroposophy.5 The
social renewal envisaged by Steiner and Beuys can only follow when sufficient people
develop the new consciousness of Imagination, Inspiration and Intuition. This is
available now to those who seek it out and is part of an evolutionary step.6

Artists have always led the way in awakening the world to new ideas, modes of thought
and levels of consciousness. Many will find a connection here. Beuys said everyone is
an artist, in the sense that everyone has a creative ability, and with it the obligation,
to collaborate in transforming the world. This insight demands that all ‘artists’ take
responsibility for their actions, through the new consciousness of heart thinking. This
is Beuys’ challenge to humanity.

To find such human, thinking hearts may seem a radical, if not impossible, task in a
world characterized by the politics of fear, hate and envy.7Yet Beuys’ Richtkrdfte stands
as a beacon, pointing the way towards the future — an enlightened and humane
future. For me, this is a world of possibilities filled with warmth and enthusiasm, a
world worthy of our humanity.

This has been a personal journey, but one that I needed to share and my hope is that others
visiting this exhibition may also discover the joy of meeting these two individuals.

ro
Notes

1. Rudolf Steiner, The Philosophy of Freedom, 1894, GA4.


2. ‘Carried on to a physiological level, this is a diagram of those at one extreme who are motivated by
chaotic warmth of w ill power, those in the central area who are governed by feeling and the heart,
and those who have reached the over- intellectualized pole of extreme theory'. See Caroline Tisdall
Joseph Beuys(exhib. cat.), The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, 1979, p. 72.
3. Rudolf Steiner, ‘Imagination, Inspiration, Intuition’, 15 December 19 11, in Wisdom of Man, of the Soul
and of the Spirit, GA115.
4. The bridge is formed when our process of mental imaging leads to perceptions and insights which we
sense are coming to us from the non-visible world, from beings whose ‘essence ... streams into us as a
process’. Rudolf Steiner, ‘Imagination, Inspiration, Intuition’, 15 December 19 11, in Wisdom of Man, of
the Soul and of the Spirit, GA115.
5. Rudolf Steiner, Anthroposophical Leading Thoughts: Anthroposophy as a Path of Knowledge, 1924-25, GA26.
Anthroposophy is a path of knowledge, to guide the spiritual in the human being to the spiritual in
the universe.
6. Rudolf Steiner, Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and its Attainment, 1904-05, GAro.
7. Rudolf Steiner, ‘Michaelmas and the Soul-Forces of Man’, 27 September 1923, in The Cycle of the Year as
Breathing-Process of the Earth, GA223. Steiner says: ‘A consummate human heart is a prerequisite to the
right to an opinion in the social realm; but this no person can possess without finding their relation
with the cosmos, and in particular, with the spiritual substance of the cosmos,’

II
Acknowledgements

Allison Holland

Since its inception in 2000, many people have contributed to the development of this
exhibition and its primary objective - to bring together in Australia Rudolf Steiner’s
drawings and a significant work by Joseph Beuys. I would sincerely like to thank
Dr Walter Kugler, Curator of the archive of the Rudolf Steiner Nachlassverwaltung,
Dornach, Switzerland who has facilitated the loan of Steiner’s drawings. In addition,
I wish to thank Dr Britta Schmitz, Senior Curator, and Otto Hubacek, Conservator,
from the Nationalgalerie im Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin, who have facilitated the
loan and installation of Beuys’ Directive forces (Of a new society) (Richtkrafte (Einer neuen
Gesellschaft)), 2974-77. The Director of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney,
Elizabeth Ann McGregor, and the Director of the National Gallery of Australia,
Canberra, Ron Radford have supported the exhibition with loans from their collections
of several Beuys multiples. Lucina Ward, Curator of International Art at the National
Gallery of Australia, has also been very generous with her assistance.

Many thanks go to the international writers - Dr Walter Kugler, Shelley Sacks and
Dr Wolfgang Zumdick - for their contributions to this catalogue. Their research is
indicative of the recent reappraisal of Beuys’ work, which takes into consideration
the influence of Steiner’s philosophies. I would also like to thank the two Australian
contributors - Ian George, a generous patron of the NGV, and Tom Nicholson, who
also advised on the film component of the exhibition.

An exhibition of this calibre involves many members of the NGV’s staff, past and
present, as well as external professionals. Two key figures were instrumental in
initiating this exhibition: Tony Elwood, previously the NGV’s Deputy Director,
International Art, now Director of the Queensland Art Gallery, and Irena Zdanowicz,
the former Senior Curator of Prints and Drawings. The NGV’s current Senior Curator
of Prints and Drawings, Cathy Leahy, instigated the negotiations for the exhibition’s
major loans and kindly allowed me to continue the project during her year of
maternity leave.

I would like to thank Jessica Gommers for the engaging design of the exhibition
catalogue and Cherie McNair for co-ordinating the exhibition. In addition, I would
like to extend my gratitude to Janelle Borig, Katherine Horseman, Dr Petra Kayser,
Jean-Philippe Larue, Brian Long, Greg Long, Caitlin Malcolm, Wendy Owen, Gina
Panebianco, Megan Patty, Julie Singleton and Philip White.

This catalogue was launched to accompany the exhibition, which is supported by


Pro Helvetia, Swiss Arts Council.

r2
Joseph B e u y s
We are the revolution
(La rivoluzione siamo Noi), 1 9 7 1
M u seu m of C o n tem porary A rt, Sydney
Gift of S i l v i a M e n z e l, 1 9 9 1
Jo se ph B e u y s
Directiveforces (Richtkrafte), 1 9 7 4 - 7 7 , b l a c k b o a r d no. 49
b la ck b o a r d , c h a l k
N a t i o n a l g a l e r i e im H a m b u r g e r B a h n h o f , B e rlin

14
Introduction

Allison Holland

Two significant thinkers of the twentieth century, one an artist and one a philosopher,
chose chalk and blackboard to communicate their message. Joseph Beuys and Rudolf
Steiner shared more than just a method or a medium - they sought to change the
world with their ideas. Joseph Beuys & Rudolf Steiner: Imagination, Inspiration, Intuition
examines the connections between these two men and how art documented their
engagement with society.

Rudolf Steiner was born in r86r in Kraljevica, which in the nineteenth century was
part of the Austo-Hungarian Empire. Steiner was a scholar of Johann Wolfgang von
Goethe’s writings before becoming involved in the mysticism of the Theosophical
Society. In rgr2 Steiner founded the Anthroposophical Society, based on his own
philosophies, and from the Society’s headquarters at the Goetheanum in Dornach,
Switzerland he disseminated his ideas across Europe. Giving over two thousand
public lectures between rcjrg and r924, Steiner used coloured chalk on black paper to
visualize his complex and esoteric ideas. Steiner’s philosophy is based on the notion
that there is a spiritual world accessible to pure thought through self-development.
Also fundamental to his epistemology was the Goethean view that just as the eye is a
perceptive instrument for light, thinking is a perceptive instrument for ideas. Steiner
advocated a holistic approach to life, a concept that underpins his development of
Waldorf education, biodynamic agriculture, Anthroposophical medicine, and artistic
and musical expressions, such as Eurhythmy.

In 2921, Joseph Beuys was born in Krefeld, Germany, four years before Steiner’s death.
In 196T he was appointed Professor of Sculpture at the Staatliche Kunstakademie
in Diisseldorf, where he had been a student from r947 to i95r. However, in 1972
Beuys was dismissed from the academy amidst great controversy over his open
teaching policy. Beuys was a political activist and member of the world-wide Fluxus
movement that promoted art as an organic and lived experience. He was renowned
for his orchestrated ritualized events, called Aktionen, which positioned him in the
avant-garde of performance art. In these performances Beuys incorporated ready­
mades and accumulations of various materials, including felt, fat and copper. As
remnants, or traces, of his performance these sculptures and installations embody
Beuys' ideas and have become important works of art for this generation. He used his
art to express the interrelationships he perceived between environment, economics,
politics and the individual. Beuys died in rg86 in Diisseldorf, where he had lived for
most of his career.

15
This exhibition, together with its accompanying catalogue, opens a dialogue between
the blackboard drawings of Rudolf Steiner and Directive forces (Of a new society)
Richtkrdfte (Einer neuen Gessellschaft), 1974-77, a seminal work by Joseph Beuys.
Supporting the concepts behind these works are two declarations outlining Steiner’s
holistic approach to living and Beuys’ insistence on the integration of art and life.
Steiner’s An appeal to the German nation and the civilized world, 1919 (p. 90), was sent
to the German government in the aftermath of World War I. Beuys’ An appeal for an
alternative, rg82 (p. 92), reflects the anxieties of the Cold War period and was publicly
launched in the artistic forum of documenta 7, one of Europe’s most significant
contemporary art exhibitions, held in Kassel, Germany.

The contributors to this catalogue bring new and varying perspectives to the visualized
thoughts and actions of Steiner and Beuys. The most respected commentator on
Steiner’s blackboard drawings is Walter Kugler, Curator at the archive of the Rudolf
Steiner Nachlassverwaltung, Dornach, Switzerland. Kugler establishes the original
circumstances of the drawings’ creation and then tracks their relatively recent
emergence and reassessment as works of art. Through his familiarity with Steiner’s
published lectures, Kugler is in a unique position to elucidate the more esoteric aspects
of individual drawings. He then discusses the centrality of ‘truth’ in the drawings of
both Steiner and Beuys.

Practising artist and academic at England’s Oxford Brookes University, Shelley Sacks
discusses Beuys’ ideas of social sculpture. Using Goethe’s concept of ‘new organs of
perception’ as a basis for her analysis, Sacks explores how Steiner and Beuys created
an alternative method of seeing, one not dependent on the physiology of the eye.
Steiner’s blackboard drawings act as portals to the metaphysical world, allowing the
viewer to re-live the original action of the maker. Beuys, like Steiner, promoted a new
social order based on freedom of thought and mutual respect, one where individuals
were able to reach their full potential. Sacks questions the role of alternative modes
of seeing in artistic production and proposes that Beuys’ ‘social sculpture’ offers a
holistic approach that positions the individual at the centre of the revolution for a
new consciousness.

Drawing from his studies in philosophy and epistemology as an independent scholar


in Germany, Wolfgang Zumdick looks for the commonalities between Beuys’ and
Steiner’s creative practices. Zumdick claims that it was Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von
Schelling who recognized that art, through the creative processes of imagination,
inspiration and intuition, combined internal and external perceptions. Starting from
Schelling’s premise, Steiner extended this idea of perception, proposing that material

r6
forms must first be conceived internally, as thought, before their external existence
can be recognized. Beuys abbreviated the complexities of Steiner’s ideas on perception
in catch phrases such as Art = Creativity. And, like Steiner, Beuys saw higher forms of
thinking - the evolution of the mind - as the way forward for humankind. Steiner’s
vision for the future was optimistic. Beuys, on the other hand, was the product of
World War II, and lived his adult life at the physical and psychological frontier of the
Cold War and the proliferation of nuclear armaments. However, the directive forces
of society that Beuys maps on to the blackboards of the Richtkrafte give expression to
his hope for a unified and beneficial change.

Tom Nicholson brings new perspectives to the Richtkrafte based on his own perfor­
mance art practice and his scholarly research on Beuys. Nicholson stresses that the
blackboards, as traces of the action in 1974 at the Institute for Contemporary Art,
London, were not so important to Beuys. It was their ability to facilitate an engage­
ment with the audience that he emphasized. In addition, Nicholson explains how
the medium of film captured the unilateral exchange between Beuys and the action
participants and extended the context of the Richtkrafte by showing the dynamism
and content of this dialogue. As well as drawing, Beuys also used vocalization and
its receiving partner, hearing, as devices to make manifest his concepts during
performance. What Beuys did not fully realize was the potential of the vestiges of
these performances to inspire a new generation.

In the spirit of endurance and persistence that Beuys demonstrated in his perfor­
mances, his film Trans-Siherian Railway, 1970-80, will be shown continuously during
the exhibition.

17
Jo se ph B e u y s
New York Subway poster, 1983
N a ti o n a l G a l l e r y o f V i c t o r ia , M e lb o u r n e
P u r c h a s e d w i t h the a ss i s t a n c e o f Ian an d C h r i s t i n e G e o r ge , 2002

18
19
Joseph B e u y s ’ A c t i o n at the In s titu te
for C o n t e m p o r a r y A r t , L ond on, 1974
Photo: C h r i s S c h w a r z
Jo se p h B e u y s ' A c t io n at the I n s ti tu t e
for C o n t e m p o r a r y A rt, L o nd on, 1974
Photo: G e r a ld In c a n d e la
Joseph Beuys
Directiveforces (Richtkrdfte), 1974-77, blackboard no. 37
blackboard, chalk
Nationalgalerie im Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin

22
A different world
The blackboard drawings of Rudolf Steiner

Walter Kugler

W hat counts
‘Ladies and Gentlemen. The world does indeed look quite different!’1 Joseph Beuys
wrote this sentence in white chalk on one (no. 37)(p. 22) of the one hundred
blackboards in his installation Directive forces (Of a new society) (Richtkrdfte (Einer
neuen Gesellschaft)), 1974-77.1 Although well intentioned, it is seen by many as a
provocation, not least because it seems like an unfinished idea. We have to ask
- just as Beuys intended - ‘different’ from what? Different, perhaps, from how our
imagination allows us to envision the world. Or ‘different’ when we incorporate
more activity and more warmth into our thinking? However we view it, this phrase
makes one thing clear above all - Beuys, like Rudolf Steiner, was interested in
provoking new approaches, in encouraging the preservation of thought from the
flood of ever-increasing information and enriching it with warmth, imagination,
inspiration and intuition. Without understanding this ideal of such an increase in
conscious energy it is impossible to understand what Beuys always saw as his greatest
contribution: the expansion of the concept of art.

What for Beuys was an ‘expanded concept of art’ was for Steiner the development of
a new philosophy: Anthroposophy, which focused on ‘mankind’s consciousness’ and
included art, religion and the social sphere.

Initially, Rudolf Steiner (1861-1925) was highly regarded as a Goethe researcher,


philosopher and literary critic. Later, he became world famous as an Anthroposophist,
as founder of the Goetheanum and of a school system as well as for being a social
reformer. Apart from writing books and giving lectures, Steiner also provided
untiring support to all those interested not only in ‘knowing, or thinking they know, a
philosophy, but of ensuring that this philosophy actually has applicability in the real
world’.3 All of today’s established Anthroposophically-oriented social institutions,
from kindergartens to nursing homes, from organic farms through to hospitals, banks
and universities, would not exist had it not been for Rudolf Steiner’s determination
to reform, to constantly question received wisdom and to create new initiatives. He
concerned himself with children’s education, the protection of the environment, the
nature of money and with overcoming traditional concepts of property, as well as
with the training of the powers of thinking and the soul. Steiner was also interested
in expanding Western medicine, which he saw as dominated by mechanistic ideas,
and was fascinated by life before birth, which he thought marked the starting point
of our earthly biography.

23
Steiner believed in the transparency of thoughts and especially in their communicative
power, from philosophy to natural science, from mankind to the cosmos, from art to life.
When talking of art, he once described the transfer function of Anthroposophy as
follows: ‘I believe that the significant element in the further development of the
humanities w ill be that philosophy, in its attempt to comprehend art, will itself
create an art of comprehension, w ill enrich thinking with imagery and reality. In
the process, the dry and abstract science we know today w ill move closer to the realm
of the arts.’4 Steiner frequently astonished his audience with an exhortation: ‘the
laboratory table must become an altar’. At the same time he appealed to the ethical
conscience of his generation and of future generations. Over a century later Joseph
Beuys pointed in the same direction with his frequently quoted saying: ‘The mysteries
take place at the main station’.5

Steiner’s world never stands still. Again and again he intentionally contrasts word
and image, thought and action, creating never-ending motion, provoking new life.
According to Steiner, ‘to understand life’ means ‘to immerse one’s soul in contra­
dictions’. For ‘where opposites are experienced as harmonious, death and inertia reign.
Life is the perpetual overcoming and simultaneous new creation of opposites.’6

Ephemeral messages
As soon as you look at Rudolf Steiner’s blackboard drawings you are touched by the
richly contrasting colours, the most varied graphic features and by the lines that run
parallel, cross each other, or radiate from a central point before coming together or
dissolving themselves at the periphery. The variety of freely drawn circles, spirals and
swirls is also very noticeable, as are the surfaces that contact or penetrate each other
as they create spaces that then dissolve again. Directions are fixed by arrows only to
be contradicted while turning points are marked and transformations provoked on
other levels. Coloured chalk is used to intensify movements that are then brought to
tranquillity in coloured sections.

The importance of Steiner’s use of colour has been commented upon by various art
critics since the first exhibition of his blackboard drawings for the general public
in the r990S.7 For Steiner, colour had a primary essential relationship with the
cosmic energies. It is the ‘soul of nature and the entire cosmos and we share this
soul by sharing the experience of colour’.8 When commenting on the use of colour
in painting, however, Steiner described it as the ‘free movement of the soul of the
cosmos’.9 Contemplation of the smallest, 5 July 2924 (p. 26), created during a lecture
series for remedial teachers, exemplifies these ideas. Two circles, the upper one blue,

24
the lower yellow, catch our attention. The colour of the clearly marked centre point
is in each case the opposite of the surrounding circle: here yellow, there blue. The
dominant gesture is one of concentration and distance, distance and concentration.
We can clearly perceive it through the graphic structure as well as through the colour.
According to Steiner’s lecture, if we want to comprehend reality, we need to 'Revere
the small. Even the smallest of things.’10

The opposite of the smallest is the largest: God. He appears as a written word on
the blackboard drawing. God represents the macro-cosmos and is contrasted with
mankind’s T, representing the human micro-cosmos. Word and symbol - one polarity
- correspond with two colours that embody, in the one instance concentration, in
the other extension - a further set of poles. The words written on the drawing come
together with the graphic gestures and merge to form a single image.

The same compositional approach can be seen in Other heads on our shoulders, rr
August r9ig (p. 34), though its subject matter could hardly be more contrasting. This
is also one of the oldest of the surviving drawings. It deals with economics and in the
circle the word 'KapitaT appears, a collective term for material existence. Outside, in
direct opposition to 'KapitaT, stands the word 'Intuition', representing the highest
form of knowledge. The arrows provide direction as they swirl around the centre of
the circle. Through them the various terms inside and outside the circle form new
relationships. They are drawn towards the centre to be once again released outwards
a moment later. Word and graphic gesture are once again synthesized before clearly
reasserting their individual natures a moment later. The smallest and the largest,
the most spiritual and the most materialist, are here sketched in a teaching course,
to address questions of economics. The basic gesture is the same in both cases:
Concentration, Connection, Extension, Distance. Capital cannot be understood
without intuition, nor the divine without thinking of the smallest.

In the blackboards, the boundaries between intuitive knowing, extra-sensory


perception and artistic creation are continuously crossed and at the same time newly
established. Nothing is left to chance. Here was someone at work who, throughout his
life, searched for the ‘ephemeral messages’ of the mind, the ritual and the profane,
and strove to create a stimulating interplay between the unknown and the familiar so
as to simultaneously push them against each other or force them apart.

25
Meditation must not involve a mood which says: I want to settle down inwardly in a warm
nest, I want to grow ever warmer and warmer. The mood that must arise involves
immersing oneself in reality and grasping hold of reality. What is needed is a contemplation
of the small, indeed of the smallest.
In me is God
I am in God

R u d o lf S t e in e r
Contemplation of the smallest, 5 Ju ly 19 2 4
C o l le c t i o n o f R u d o lf S t e in e r N a c h l a s s v e r w a l t u n g , D o r n a c h , S w i t z e r la n d

26
Parallel processes
Drawing began to play an essential role in Steiner’s life early on and he gained
entry to a high-level college at the age of ten, thanks to the sketches he presented
to the admissions committee. Drawing later became an indispensable element of
his thinking process. ‘I would, for example, like very much to draw the content of
my philosophy of freedom’, he confessed to his listeners in December 1917. But he
seems to have seen the lack of prospects for such an undertaking and in the same
breath commented: ‘But today, people would not be able to read it. They would not
be able to feel it because we are conditioned by words.’ 11 In the meantime, it had
become for him a matter of course ‘to formulate everything I get from the intellectual
world with a pencil in the hand, either in words or in some kind of drawings’.12 The
activity of drawing was also a necessity for him. It allowed him to ‘connect the mind’s
explorations with the rest of the person so that comprehension is not left only to the
head and its verbal communications, but is experienced by the whole person.’13 The
purpose of a blackboard drawing and the process that creates it is thus to facilitate a
holistic, emotional and will-based intelligence and not one founded solely on intellect.

Beuys once said that his blackboards were ‘the extension of [my] ideas’.14With Steiner’s
blackboards in mind we can also come to the contrary conclusion: that the idea is
the extension of the image. Image and thought may appear separately and are both
subject to their respective laws, but in the end both come from the same source. Both
the work of Steiner and that of Beuys illustrate this. Moreover, in their respective
imperfection, both image and idea depend on each other.

Today, thanks to the artist Emma Stolle, Steiner’s blackboard drawings can be seen
in exhibitions around the world. Stolle, a keen listener to, and observer of, Steiner’s
lectures was disappointed that his drawings were erased after each lecture. Around
1917 she got him to cover the blackboards and draw directly onto black cardboard or
paper during his lectures. After the chalk was fixed onto the paper, each sheet was
dated and some 1100 blackboard sheets were preserved in this way. Apart from those
lost in the 1992 fire in the Goetheanum building, all of Steiner’s blackboard drawings
have been published as part of the 30-volume edition of Steiner’s Complete Works.

The idea of Steiner’s blackboard drawings as independent works of art in their


own right was first raised in 1958 by the Russian artist Assja Turgenieff when
she viewed one of the first exhibitions at the Rudolf Steiner Archiv in Dornach.
A couple of decades later, when one of Joseph Beuys’ students, Johannes Stlittgen,
visited the archive, he reflected: ‘Someone who looks at these drawings without

27
knowing the lectures they originate from, will find an inner assurance of their
prevailing coherence, which will seem to be the exact opposite of sectarianism,
dogmatism, compulsiveness and obscurantism, exactly because of this lack of
knowledge. It is precisely this immediate, eye-catching coherence or playful
precision that lends the chalk on the dark paper the grace of a butterfly wing. And
deep in one’s heart, one accepts it as a warranty for true science and calls it art in
the meantime. Indeed, one has to call it art!’15

Stiittgen and fellow student Walter Dahn went on to convince gallery owner Monika
Spriith of the importance for the art world of the Steiner drawings and in 1992 she
staged an exhibition of forty of his drawings in Cologne. Though the idea of presenting
these drawings as independent works of art was questioned in Anthroposophy circles,
for art critics the exhibition was a great success. Since 1992 over fifty museums and
modern art venues have exhibited ever-changing combinations of Rudolf Steiner’s
blackboards.16

Directive forces of a new society


At first glance, Beuys and Steiner have little in common. And yet if we leave aside all
the prejudices and judgements and the crude attempts to allocate Beuys and Steiner
to opposing ideological camps, it soon becomes apparent that each in his own way
‘narrates’ the same things and non-things. In temporally different parallel processes,
they both open up a worldview that cannot leave anyone untouched. Joseph Beuys
made clear how close he felt himself to be to Rudolf Steiner’s eloquent expression
in a letter to the producer at Radio Freiburg, Manfred Schradi: ‘Your words were
very moving as they brought to mind the name of Rudolf Steiner. Since my childhood
I have frequently thought of him because, as I know, he gave me the task of gradually,
and in my own way, removing mankind’s separation from and mistrust of the
supernatural’ (p. 88).17

This proximity becomes very clear when we focus on the interpretative side of the
installation Richtkrafte, rather than concentrating, as many art historians do, only on
its formal aspects. At the centre of one of three standing blackboards, on the middle
blackboard (no. 27) to be precise, appear the words ‘The Truth’ (p. 8). From these words,
ray-like lines stretch outwards, pointing to the words Phenomenalism, Realism,
Mathematism, Monadism, Pneumatism, Spiritualism, Idealism, Rationalism,
Dynamism, Sensualism and Naturalism. It could be argued that the words on the
periphery of the group indicate a variety of methods and instances of how the world
could ideally be seen or conceived. They press inwards, towards the Truth. This

28
reading corresponds almost exactly with Steiner’s blackboard drawings from the
lectures he held in Berlin on 21 and 22 January 1914 (though the originals are lost,
Steiner’s diagrams have survived through the work of stenographers). In Steiner’s
diagrams we also find the term Psychism, though instead of Naturalism, Steiner
writes Materialism. In Beuys’ work we encounter a program of action for humanity
that attempts to clarify the multi-faceted perception and thought processes that are
required to arrive at the ‘truth’. This intention is in agreement with Steiner’s words
from 1914:

The world reveals itself only to those who know that they have to circumvent
it....For those who are not bent on observing and pondering everything in a
particular, limited field in order to make sense of it before seeking the proof, but
rather for those who are bent on penetrating the truth of the world, it is important
to know that this omni-directionality is necessary and expressed by the fact that
the human mind is really accessible to twelve typical worldview nuances.... Just as
the sun passes through the star signs, the human soul passes through the mind.18

Shortened and complemented by Beuysian humour, these thoughts result in the


drawing Truth as a Sparkler (Die Wahrheit als Wunderkerze) (p. 31).19

Neither the subject matter of the Richtkrdfte nor the term itself is at issue. On one of
his blackboards Beuys wrote ‘Directive powers of a new society’ and then an entire
repertoire of terms revolving around the subject ‘new society’, which he recalled
to his audience in countless events (p. 14). Many of his blackboards emphasize
critical reflections about economic concepts and Beuys believed that the concept of
the ‘competition economy’ should be replaced by that of the ‘association’. The idea
of working together instead of against each other had appeared in various forms
throughout Rudolf Steiner’s book Toward Social Renewal, 1919, which was much
discussed when first published. But why should a society based on associations be more
humane than one that adheres to the principle of competition? ‘Such associations’,
Steiner said in his lecture on 29 August r920, ‘w ill not achieve anything special if
they don’t have any directive forces. These are powers that come from imaginative
recognition, that arise from the science of initiation. There needs to be people who
are in a certain sense initiated. And they need to use their experience in the business
world to put it on the right track....From the science of initiation we have to find
what the foundation of business life is using as its directive forces. These initiations,
directive forces, have to establish order in business life.’ 30

29
Notes

1. Joseph Beuys, Richtkrafte, 1974-77, blackboard no. 37, Nationalgalerie im Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin.
Beuys wrote the sentence on the same blackboard in both German and English.
2. Rudolf Steiner, The Renewal of the social organism, 1919, GA24.
3. Joseph Beuys, Richtkrafte, 1974-77, blackboard no. 49, Nationalgalerie im Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin.
Beuys wrote the words on this blackboard in German and in English: 'Richtkrafte einer neuen
Gesellschaft’ and ‘Directive powers of a new society’.
4. Rudolf Steiner responding to questions after the lecture, 30 September 1920, in Complete Works, fifth
edition, Dornach, GA283,1989, p. 63.
5. Joseph Beuys in discussion with Peter Brugge, in Der Spiegel, 4 June 1984.
6. Rudolf Steiner, ‘Story of my life’, 1928, in Complete Works, ninth edition, Dornach, 2000, GA28, p. 318.
7. For example, the blackboard drawings were described thus in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung:
‘The drawings in coloured and white chalk glow against the dark background like ephemeral messages
from the world of the mind. They illustrate Steiner’s constant efforts to synthesize intellect and
perception, thinking and creativity. They also document the influence that Steiner’s visual thinking
had on the work of Joseph Beuys.’ ‘Anschauliches Denken unterwegs zu Beuys: Die Lehrtafeln Rudolf
Steiners’, in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 22 July 1992.
8. Rudolf Steiner, ‘The creative world of colours’, 26 July 1914, in The Nature of Colours, fourth edition,
Dornach, 1991, GA291, p. 93.
9. ibid p. 172.
10 . Rudolf Steiner, ‘Curative education’, lecture 10,5 July 1924, in Complete Works, eighth edition, Dornach,
1995.GA317, p.155.
11. Rudolf Steiner, (untitled lecture), 3 December 1917, in Complete Works, first edition, Dornach, 2005,
GAK45, p. 17.
12. Rudolf Steiner, ‘What was the purpose of the Goetheanum and what is the task of Anthroposophy?’
lecture 1,9 April 1923, in Complete Works, second edition, Dornach, 1986, GA84, p. 39.
13. ibid.
14. Joseph Beuys, quoted from Joseph Beuys und das Kapital, Schaff hausen, 1988, p. 89. See also Franz-
Joachim Verspohl, Zeichnen ist eigentlich ... nichts anderes als Planung. Joseph Beuys bei der Tafelarbeit,
publication on the occasion of the exhibition in the Galerie Lohrl Munchengladbach from n
December 1988 to 15 February 1989.
15. Johannes Stiittgen in the preface in Walter Kugler (ed), Rudolf Steiner, Wenn die Erde Mond wird,
Wandtafelzeichnungen 1919-1924, DuMont, Cologne, 1992, p. 10.
16. Immediately after the 1992 Cologne exhibition of Steiner’s blackboards, Kasper Konig showed them
at the Portikus in Frankfurt and other exhibitions followed at the Lenbachhaus in Munich, the
Kunstmuseum in Bern and at the Albertina in Vienna. A few years later they were shown at Tokyo’s
Watari-Um Museum in Osaka, and in Berkeley and New York. In 1999, Steiner’s blackboards were
shown at the Kunsthaus Zurich, together with Beuys’ installation Richtkrafte.
17. From a letter from Joseph Beuys to Manfred Schradi, written on 21 October 1971 and first published
in Dieter Koepplin, Joseph Beuys: Plastische Bilder 1947-1970 (exh. cat.), Galerie der Stadt Kornwestheim
(D), Verlag Gerd Hatje, Stuttgart, 1990, p. 31.
18. Rudolf Steiner, lecture 2,21 January 1914, in Human and cosmic thought, GA151.
19. Joseph Beuys, Richtkrafte, 1974-77, blackboard no. 19, Nationalgalerie im Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin.
20. Rudolf Steiner, ‘Humanities as knowledge of the basic impulses of social constitution’, 29 August 1920,
in Complete Works, 1985, GA199/2, p, 189.

30
Jo se p h B e u y s
Directiveforces (Richtkrafte), 1 9 7 4 - 7 7 , b la c k b o a r d no. 19
b la c k b o a r d , c h a l k
N a ti o n a l g a l e ri e im H a m b u r g e r B a h n h o f , B erlin

31
Just think how dead the cosmos is when we look out there and see only burning bodies of gas
that shine! Just think how alive it all becomes when we know: Those stars are expressions of
love, with which the astral cosmos works on the etheric cosmos!

Rudolf Steiner
The stars and expression of love, 4 June 1924
Collection of Rudolf Steiner Nachlassverwaltung, Dornach, Switzerland

32
Take the earth: It has to have summer and winter in different parts at the same time, hut
you can never mix the two together. In the human being, summer and winter are constantly
being combined microcosmically. When a person is asleep, his physical summer is mixed
with his spiritual winter; when he is awake, his physical winter is mixed with his spiritual
summer. In outer nature, human beings experience winter and summer separately during
the course of the year. But within themselves they perpetually mix winter and summer
from two different directions. So in the outer course of nature, if I want to put in a diagram,
winter and summer have to be shown one after the other for the earth; they will follow one
another in time. But for the human being I have to draw the two streams side by side but in
an odd way. I have to draw them side by side showing that within the human being there is
always winter and summer at the same time. Only there is an alternation between spirit-
summer and body-winter on the one hand and spirit-summer and body-summer on the other.

Rudolf Steiner
Winter and summer at the same time, 29 D e c e m b e r 1922
C o l le c ti o n of R u d o lf S t e in e r N a c h l a s s v e r w a l t u n g , D o r n a c h , S w i t z e r la n d

33
People today are unable to divest themselves of their customary concepts. Yet the most
important point now isfor us to believe not merely that isolated external circumstances need
changing but that we must transform our ideas, our concepts, our sentiments. It would not be
wrong to say: We need other heads on our shoulders.

Commodities Labour Capital

Imagination Inspiration Intuition


Fraternity Equality Liberty
Economic life Life of Rights Spiritual life

Rudolf Steiner
Other heads on our shoulders, n August 1919
Collection of Rudolf Steiner Nacfilassverwaltung, Dornach, Switzerland

34
Jo se ph B e u y s
Directiveforces (Richtkrafte), 19 7 4 -7 7 , b la c k b o a r d no. 14
b l a c k b o a r d , c h a lk
N a t i o n a l g a l e r i e i m H a m b u r g e r B a h n h o f , Berlin

35
Joseph Beuys
Directiveforces (Rich tkrafte), 1974-77, blackboard no. 52
blackboard, chalk
Nationalgalerie im Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin

36
Seeing the phenomenon and imaginal thought
Trajectories for transformation in the work of Joseph Beuys and Rudolf Steiner

Shelley Sacks

This exhibition, in bringing together works by Joseph Beuys and Rudolf Steiner,
offers the viewer access not only to the things themselves but also to a mode of seeing
and knowing.

This mode of seeing and knowing underpins all of Rudolf Steiner’s work and is
integral to Joseph Beuys’ ‘expanded concept of art’, or ‘social sculpture’, as he later
described it. It has to do with a mode of inner activity and perception that enables
us to connect more deeply with the inner and outer world, to better understand the
transformational goals we set and the directive forces-the Richtkrafte-towards such
transformation.

New organs of perception


Informed by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s search for a way of knowing that does not
remain forever outside the thing to be known, Beuys and Steiner share an emphasis
on ‘seeing the phenomenon’, using Goethe’s phrase ‘new organs of perception’ to refer
to capabilities that are necessary for a holistic perception of the world. This is a way of
seeing that turns the fragmenting perspectives of materialist science on its head.

In this participatory approach to knowing,1 the observer becomes united with the
observed. As an observer, I enter the phenomenon through a process of careful,
attentive observation and take its image into the darkness, into the inner space of
perception and imagination. I inhabit it. I participate in its gesture. I live its activity in
myself. I live its interconnections. I perceive the wholeness that manifests as diversity.
And in this process of engaging with the dynamic being, of making an inner image
of what has been observed, I too am transformed. This process of perception involves
the shaping of myself as well. One could say, with Goethe,2 Steiner and Beuys, that
each new act of connective seeing develops in oneself a new organ of perception.

New forms of knowing


The epistemological focus of Goethe’s work - concerned not only with ways of
perceiving colour or the plant but also with how we know - is clearly one of the
main reasons for his increasing contemporary relevance.3 It is also the starting point
for a methodology of knowing implicit in all of Beuys’ and Steiner’s work. With its
emphasis on relational knowing and the direct perception of the organizing idea in
things, Goethe’s approach challenges the dualistic Cartesian paradigm that fragments
everything into parts. It offers an alternative to the rationalist, linear, onlooker mode
of consciousness, in which, as Kant rightly understood, the thing-in-itself can never
be known.4

37
Although this alternative method of seeing does not depend on the physical eye,
Goethe’s field of concern is nevertheless still the visible world. Steiner, however,
extends Goethe’s ‘exact sensorial imagination’ beyond the visible world to include
that territory not visible to our ordinary senses.

The blackboard entitled The realm of the Angeloi, 1924,5 (p. 51) is a good example,
focusing as it does on the two-way process of light incarnating on the earth through
green matter and returning once again to the cosmos as, one could say, the light
of consciousness. Other blackboards like Physical body - Ether body, 1923 (p. 45),
Woven Sunlight, 1923 (p. 48), and What is thinking?, 1923 (p. 50), also take us into
the realm of the inner eye. They are portals to things commonly unseen; investiga­
tions into the world of interrelationships, perceptions in the etheric dimension that
the spiritual traditions have long claimed possible. Like much of science they deal
with the unseen and the super-sensible, enabling us to know these formative forces
and subtle realities, but from non-quantitative perspectives. Above all, they offer us
a chance to practise and participate in this etheric seeing of ourselves.6

Engendering inner activity


In a lecture to construction workers7 Steiner describes how his blackboards - arising
through imaginal thought processes - engender inner activity in the viewer,
enabling the audience to participate inwardly in their process of becoming. He also
sees the resulting blackboards as an entry point from the final form, to which we
have access now, back into the process of their creation. From this lecture it is clear
that engendering inner activity through the blackboard ‘actions’ is as important for
Steiner as the specific content or substance the blackboards convey.

Although Steiner didn’t describe his blackboard work as ‘actions’ - this term came
later with Beuys - seeing these blackboard lectures as actions in the Beuysian sense
helps us recognize Steiner’s blackboards as starting points for experiences that go
beyond their glowing visual fascination. We realize that they are portals to the
territory of active imaginal work that takes place in us when we re-enter and relive
the action.

Dispatches from the super-sensible world


Beuys, too, looks with internal eyes at the world, offering us many illuminating
dispatches from this sphere of inner sight, like his drawing Ich, 1960* which
reveals what happens when we sleep, Beuys’ understandings about the body are
reflected in statements like: ‘Anyhow, I think with my knees’, as well as in the image

38
of the threefold human being with crystalline nose in the air, that we see on many
of Beuys’ blackboards. This threefold human being underpins Beuys’ unflagging
commitment to the need for direct democracy, to an associative economics,9 and to a
free educational and cultural sphere that would enable people to realize their higher
abilities. Here, as Steiner did before him, Beuys focuses the new organs of perception
on the social dimension itself (p. 34).10

Perceiving what needs to be done


It is this emphasis on alternative forms of knowing what needs to be done that
differentiate Steiner’s vision of ‘social architecture’ and Beuys’ ‘social sculpture’
from other forms of transformational practice. Not surprisingly, however, this
mode of knowing - involving direct perceptions of realities or truths, which include
appropriate, future social forms11 - leads not only to new understandings and
motivations but also to important questions. Central among these is the question of
the relationship between truth and freedom.

Speaking about ‘truth’ in the twenty-first century, when all ‘grand narratives’ have
been refuted, is difficult.12 But it is even more difficult, in a post-modern, pluralistic
mind-set, to speak of freedom and truth in one breath. Are they not mutually exclusive?
Is every perception not simply another perspective, a function of the particular lens
through which it is seen? Can the freedom that is so central in the work of Beuys
and Steiner - the emphasis on freedom in our thinking, on the self-determining
individual and the shaping of a social order predicated on freedom - exist where there
are pre-existing truths?

A social order based on freedom


In hundreds of lectures, images and blackboards, both Steiner and Beuys describe a
new world order worthy of all beings, a social order based not on exploitation, but on
mutuality and deep respect. They see in human beings an impulse toward freedom,
and the potentially free human being that beckons us. It is an impulse toward freedom,
in Beuys’ words, whose ‘origin lies in the future’.13

Building on Steiner’s perceptions of a necessary threefold order and Wilhelm


Schumdt’s 14 further developments of this work, Beuys lectured, made images and
worked actively to offer strategies for moving towards a society that recognizes the
potential for ‘every human being [to become] an artist’ and shape a viable world. But
can perceiving the necessary threefold structure of the social organism, in advance,
co-exist with a commitment to a social order predicated on the self-determining

39
Here is the human being; and somewhere out there is ‘the thing in itself. But we know
nothing of that. Yet this 'thing in itself now makes an impression on the eye. Of this we
also still know nothing. And in there, within the human being, now arises an appearance,
and we take this appearance and puff it up to become the whole world. Kant only created
concepts, not the world.
i. Transcendental aesthetics Transcendental deduction of space
i. Quantity 2. Quality 3. Relation 4. Modality
Unity Being
Multiplicity Characteristic
All-ness Becoming

R u d o lf Steiner
Immanuel Kant, 1 4 M ay 19 2 4
C o l le c t i o n of R u d o lf S t e i n e r N a c h l a s s v e r w a l t u n g , D o r n a c h , S w i t z e r la n d

40
Here [left] we have the physical body and the ether body [yellow]. Itfills the whole of the
physical body. And here [right] we have the astral body, which is outside the human being
at night [red]. At the top it is very small and hugely bulging down below. Then we have the
I [violet]. This is how we are in the night. We are two people in the night.

R u d o lf Steine r
In the night we are tiuo people, 1 6 Ju n e 1 9 2 3
C o l le c t i o n of R u d o lf S t e i n e r N a c h l a s s v e r w a l t u n g , D o r n a c h , S w i t z e r la n d

41
individual and freedom? Is this not a top-down utopian vision and an irreconcilable
contradiction?

Questions like this were often put to Beuys when he emphasized the relationship
between a future holistic social order and the threefold organization of all life forms.
They are questions I myself used to ask Beuys, particularly when he stressed the need
for a theory of knowledge that allows one ‘to know instead of to believe’.15 Years later,
when I had access to the in-depth presentation of Goethe’s work on different modes of
knowing, by scientists like Henri Bortoft and Arthur Zajonc, I began to make sense of
what Beuys had meant. Here were scientists inspired by Goethe’s detailed approach to
knowing the essential being of a thing perceived, that, since the Enlightenment, the
rationalist world had consigned to the world of belief.

Richtkrafte and the ‘permanent conference’


In r975,1was with Beuys in New York when he installed Directiveforces (Ofa new society)
(Richtkrafte (Einer neuen Gesellschaft)), 1974-77, at the Rene Block Gallery. Each day
during the following weeks Beuys would speak to people - curious, inspired, and
hostile - about the need for appropriate goals to direct our energies towards, and for
a threefold structuring of society to facilitate freedom, participatory democracy and
an alternative economics. The question about whether utopias and freedom were
inimical to each other, not surprisingly, came up regularly too. Here, as during the
one hundred days of discussion at documenta 6, r977, Beuys repeatedly stressed:

Let anyone put forward their point of view; let them explain the view of a human
being on which it is based. And then people can discuss this, explore this; look
into the picture that underlies the proposal. But we do need proposals to work
toward; something to direct our energies toward.16

I have learned over the years what an astonishing process it is to enter a proposal
imaginatively, in a participatory way, instead of arguing, analysing or trying to
persuade. Not only do we get a deeper sense of the proposal, but it also helps us make
choices, stops us from being caught in the yes/no binary oppositions that appear
whenever there is a major decision to be made, the yes/no state that is embodied in
Beuys’ durational sound work Ja, ja, ja, ja, ja, nee, nee, nee, nee, nee, 1969. This process
of entering deeply into the proposals, which is also a process of co-operative enquiry,
of negotiation and exchange, is what Beuys describes as the ‘permanent conference’.
It is also what safeguards against top-down utopianism. Every proposal has to be
lived, considered and taken on in freedom, a freedom that is utterly compromised

42
when we confuse freedom from with freedom to. This corresponds with Carl Gustav
Jung’s view that freedom lies in how we respond to the givens. From this perspective,
freedom can be understood to include responsibility, or our ability-to-respond.
We are all in a field of existence that is framed by certain realities - day and night,
specific relationships, the need for shelter and food, and a limit to the carbon we can
pump into the atmosphere. This being so, the knowledge of our Richtkrafte, of what
drives us, can help us respond creatively, that is, in freedom, to such framing realities
and forces.

The making of Richtkrafte was a permanent conference process in itself: the one hundred
blackboards now on the floor arose from intense exchanges about shaping a humane
and ecologically viable future. One of these one hundred blackboards contains what
Steiner described as the twelve ‘world outlooks’ (p. 8),17 the inner mental zodiac
through which we see the world. One could also describe them as lenses. However,
instead of freedom meaning relativism, where each lens is necessarily just another
equally valid point of view, these different perceptions can be seen as deriving from
a wholeness and inspiring a more holistic awareness on which we can build. Beuys’
Richtkrafte is a provocation to talk, to look at our proposals together and to choose
- allowing the mysterious hare in the moon image to remind us of the larger cosmic
constellation we are part of, whilst the walking-stick that (re)turns at the top (or at
the bottom, if you carry it like Beuys did in Richtkrafte), embodies the flow of will and
thought-work for bringing new insights into the world.

New organs of perception and social sculpture


But what do these alternative modes of seeing have to do with our work as artists in
Steiner’s or Beuys’ expanded sense, with the concept, process, teaching and shaping
of social sculpture?

If social sculpture is not just any doing, in any direction, but strives to shape a holistic
and integrative way of being, we have to base our proposals on an approach that
begins with seeing the unified whole.

In this sense, social sculpture often differs from social process art and many
related practices, even when they involve a degree of social shaping. In seeing
external crises as opportunities for consciousness, social sculpture foregrounds the
need for new organs of perception and new goals, and goes beyond combining visual
or physical forms with discussion, problem-solving or forms of participation.
Breaking through the rationalist veils, and developing holistic perspectives on

43
which to base our choices, is part of a revolution in seeing. As Beuys said: ‘We are the
revolution’ (p. 13).18

But it takes time for new consciousness to take hold and we cannot wait until this
occurs. This is why - as Beuys stressed, especially in the last years of his life -
we need to work in multidimensional ways. Alongside the necessary legislation to
halt the time and space destruction we need deep shifts in consciousness to enable
the evolution of a society worthy of all life forms.

This exhibition of works by Beuys and Steiner is part of this evolutionary process since
it has to do with transforming our mode of perception and seeing with connective
eyes. It is a place of proposals, new modes of thought, of embracing and revelations.
To extend beyond oneself with new organs of perception is an act of loving that
connects, a form of inter-being15 that makes for holistic transformation. As Steiner
said: ‘we can only grasp such things [realities] when we receive them in our hearts’,20
embracing the world in ourselves as we work towards a sustainable way of being.

In this exhibition for lovers of the world, which encourages empathy and co­
operation, we come to understand that our circles of influence can only grow, as
our love grows.

44
What is the human being’s physical body? It is the body that is subject to thoseforces which
lead to the centre of the earth. What is the human being’s ether body? It is that in the human
being which is subject to theforces that comefrom everywhere out of the periphery of the
universe. This can be directly derived by looking at the shape of the human being. Thus the
legs have their shape because they are more adapted to the earthly forces, while the head’s
shape is more adapted to the peripheral forces.

R u d o lf S tein e r
Physical body - Ether body, 30 D e c e m b e r 1923
C o l le c t i o n of R u d o lf S t e in e r N a c h l a s s v e r w a l t u n g , D o r n a c h , S w i t z e r la n d

45
Notes

1. Discussed with immense clarity by the English scientist Henri Bortoft in The Wholeness of Nature:
Goethe’s Way of Science, Floris Books, Edinburgh, 1996. Goethe’s approach has been significant in
discussions between scientists in the Dalai Lama’s Body/Mind group, exploring the interface of
spiritual knowledge and new approaches to science.
2. Goethe said that 'every object well contemplated creates an organ [of perception] in us’. Quoted by
A. P. Cotterell, in David Seamon & Arthur Zajonc (eds), Goethe’s Way of Science: A Phenomenology of
Nature, State University of New York, Albany, New York, 1998, pp. 255-76.
3. Goethe’s integrative and connective approach to engaging with the world figures strongly in a number
of interdisciplinary explorations: in the philosophy of science (Zajonc), morphology and evolutionary
biology (Sheldrake), cognitive philosophy (Vygotsky), transformational learning (Scharmer/M.I.T),
social healing (Pogacnic), community development (Kaplan) and transformative social process
(cooperative enquiry and social sculpture).
4. Contemporary physicist Arthur Zajonc describes how Goethe’s methodology is not about object
consciousness but about movement and relationships ‘learning to live cognitively in relationships’.
He describes it as ‘the crossing point between the phenomenal domain and the conceptual domain ...
a threshold... in which the moment of seeing is the moment of discovery, of insight, of apercu, as
Goethe called it. Everything hangs on this apercu, the possibility of apperception, of perceiving.
Real knowledge is, for Goethe, a kind of seeing. It is not just opening your eyes and seeing what is
around you in the naive sense. But it is basically moving oneself inwardly to the point where one
can stand before the ... thing perceived and see it not just as that thing but also as the co-presence of
all the inter-relational factors it consists of, So, one lives in a liminal space, between perception and
theory, but “ theory" in its original sense of meaning to behold ...’ (Prof. Arthur Zajonc in dialogue
with Otto C. Scharmer, Investigating the Space of the Invisible, Amherst, Massachusetts, 15 March 2003.
See www.collectivewisdominitiative.org)
5. Rudolf Steiner, ‘The Karma of the Anthroposophical Movement’, lecture 7,3 August 1924,
in Karmic Relationships: Esoteric Studies III, GA237/7.
6. Seeing an internal connection can be understood in the same sense that we see a gestalt. This is
completely different from adding a connection. It is not an additional element that links two things
together. Seeing connections is the work of imagination.
7. Rudolf Steiner, ‘ Learning to See into the Spiritual World’, lecture 6, 18 July 1923, GA350.
8. Jospeh Beuys, Ich, i960, is reproduced in Beuys vor Beuys: Fruhren Zeichnungen aus der Sammlung
van derGrinten, Bonn, Germany, 1987; no 193, Tafel 5.
9. In this integral economic system money does not accumulate, work is not linked to wages and
production is shaped by consciously agreed need, not profit. See Action Third Road: Alternatives to
existing forms of private and state capitalism (trans.) Shelley Sacks 8<: Anke Cram, FIU, Cape Town,
South Africa, 1978.
10. Rudolf Steiner, Other heads on our shoulders, 11 August 1919, GA296/3, depicts the threefold
organization of the social sphere. It has much in common with many blackboards that Beuys
did depicting the proposed threefold social organism and its relationship to the human being, to
thinking, feeling and will as well as to the corresponding higher forms of thought: Imagination,
Inspiration, Intuition.
11. Providing the directive forces (Richtkrdfte), according to which we can direct our energies.
12. The concept of grand narratives, or meta-narratives, was introduced by French philosopher
Jean-Franqois Lyotard in his work The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, 1979, where
he characterized the postmodern condition as scepticism towards forms of transcendent or
universal truth,
13. ’... aber die Ursache Zukunft liegt in die Zukunft’ in G. Jappe, BEUYSPACKEN- Dokumente ig68-igg6,
1. Aufl., Lindinger + Schmid, Regensburg, Germany, 1996.
14. See W. Schumndt, Zeitgemdsse Wirtschaftsgeselze, Achberger Verlag, Germay, 1980. For material in
English see www.dreigliederung.de

46
15- According to Beuys, Steiner’s great accomplishment ‘was never to have “discovered” anything, but
(only!) to have brought forth all that out of an infinitely expanded perception, which is the higher
longing of people, even if they do not yet know it’. In Dieter Koepplin, Joseph Beuys - Plastischer Bilder
1947-1970 (exh. cat.), Stuttgart, 1970, p.31, fn 23.
16. My notes from a dialogue at the Rene Block Gallery, New York, April 1975.
17. The twelve ‘world outlooks’ Steiner describes are: Idealism, Rationalism, Mathematism, Materialism,
Sensationalism, Phenomenalism, Realism, Dynamism, Monadism, Spiritism, Pneumatism, Psychism.
See Rudolf Steiner, ‘Human and Cosmic Thought', lecture 3, 22 January 1914, GA151.
18. Joseph Beuys, La rivoluzionie siamo Noi, 1972 is the original title of this multiple. The image is of Beuys
walking forwards, towards us and the future.
19. A term used by the Buddhist teacher, Thich Nhat Hahn, denoting the interconnected reality of which
we need to become aware.
20. Rudolf Steiner, ‘Entry of the Michaelic Forces’, lecture 9, 3 August 1924, in Karmic Relationships: Esoteric
Studies III, GA237.

47
I f you look at the cocoon of a silkworm you will see that it is woven sunlight.
The sunlight is embodied in the substance of the silk-spinning caterpillar. In this way
the inner space is entirely closed off. Outer sunlight is as though overcome. So the sun,
which formerly exercised the physical power that caused the silkworm to spin its cocoon,
now has power over what goes on inside it, creating the butterfly from within.

Rudolf Steiner
Woven sunlight, 19 October 1923
Collection of Rudolf Steiner Nachlassverwaltung, Dornach, Switzerland

48
Even in olden times people spoke of a threefold sun: the sun as the source of light, as the
source of life, as the source of love. If the sun alone were to work within the human being he
would be unable to process matter, he would have no metabolism. He owes his metabolism
to the circumstance that mercury weakens the effect of the sun. The mercury nature pushes
matter right through the human organism and into the individual organs.
Source of light Form Life
Sun Source of life
Source of love
Saturn, Jupiter, Mars, Sun, Mercury, Venus, Moon, Earth

R u d o lf S tein e r
The threefold sun, 29 O c to be r 1 9 2 1
C o l le c t i o n o f R u d o lf S t e in e r N a c h l a s s v e r w a l t u n g , D o r n a c h , S w i t z e r la n d

49
Thinking means: to do something inwardly just as one does it outwardly, for example when
you use your arm or your hand. When you use andfeel your arms you are experiencing
your physical body. I f you only have to give yourself another little jolt in order to make the
transition from feeling your arm or leg movements tofeeling your innerforces of thinking
then, at that moment, you feel your second human being, your etheric human being, your
being of formative forces. And you experience that being as something woven entirely of
thoughts. At that moment the whole of your earthly life is presentfor you.

R u d o lf S tein e r
What is thinking?, 20 A p r i l 1923
C o l le c t i o n o f R u d o l f S t e i n e r N a c h l a s s v e r w a l t u n g , D o r n a c h , S w i t z e r la n d

50
It now comes about that out of a relatively unified realm oftheAngeloi a divided realm of
the Angeloi arises, a realm of the Angeloi with an inclination to move upwards [yellow] and
with an inclination to move downwards into the lower worlds.

R u d o lf S t e i n e r
The realm of the Angeloi, 3 A u g u s t 192 4
C o l le c t i o n o f R u d o lf S t e i n e r N a c h l a s s v e r w a l t u n g , D o r n a c h , S w i t z e r l a n d
Joseph Beuys
Directive forces (Richtkrafte), 1974-77, blackboard no. 20
blackboard, chalk
N a t i o n a l g a l e r i e ira H a m b u r g e r B a h n h o f, B erlin

52
In us, or nowhere, is eternity
Philosophical reflections on the exhibition of blackboard drawings
by Joseph Beuys and Rudolf Steiner at the National Gallery of Victoria

Wolfgang Zumdick

The similarities between the work of Joseph Beuys and Rudolf Steiner are not
immediately obvious. Steiner’s artistic output is very different from that of Beuys. This
is one of the reasons why the extent of Beuys’ references to Steiner only became clear
quite recently. The considerable intellectual commonality of the two does, however,
become particularly apparent as soon as we look at questions of philosophy and
epistemology, even though this shared thinking is masked by external appearances.
The spectacular rediscovery of Steiner’s drawings in the early nineties highlighted
the connections between the blackboard drawings of Steiner and Beuys. Suddenly,
the previously unsuspected affinity of their work came to light, as did the artistic
quality of Steiner’s genius.

To understand what was happening when Joseph Beuys and Rudolf Steiner spoke,
lectured, communicated and sketched, we have to go back a long way and search for
the personal foundations from which these two artists drew their power to inspire.
For many, it might seem unusual when a text about art begins by considering the
worldview of the artists concerned. After all, what does art have to do with philosophy?
In the case of Joseph Beuys and Rudolf Steiner, however, I believe it is not possible
to comprehend their work without considering the intellectual background against
which their drawings appear like silhouettes of Earth against the dawn.

A way out of the fly-bottle


Romanticism threw up a question that was to be of importance for the development
of the human spirit and that echoed through the great philosophical discussions
between Immanuel Kant, Friedrich Schiller, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and,
above all, Johann Gottlieb Fichte. The resolution of this question was very important
for our consideration of the thinking of Beuys and Steiner.

Kant’s thinking inspired epistemological discussions that posed the question: what
does the self-aware, feeling and thinking person make of things outside the self, in
other words everything that is in the external world? We know everything about our
inner lives. But how does this correlate to everything outside our inner world? How
can I be sure that everything I think, feel and experience about the world out there
corresponds to the reality of that world? Perhaps one could even say that ‘nothing out
there’ was created by us. We did not even create our own physical existence. While
the old metaphysicists talked of God or Creation, Kant, with his intimate knowledge
of Newtonian physics, could no longer accept such an explanation. He wanted to
preserve a role for God by revealing the boundaries of human knowledge. Sensing
the threat to metaphysics posed by the scepticism of the emerging natural sciences,

53
Kant sought to rescue the older philosophy and along with it, God and religion. But
the solution he offered did not satisfy the upcoming generation of philosophers and
poets. According to Kant, the things we encounter outside us remain closed to us. Our
thoughts do not reach ‘the essence of things’, the ‘not-I’, as Fichte was to call it. In the
end, the world remains in our heads. As Ludwig Wittgenstein later put it, we ‘cannot
find a way out of the fly-bottle’.1

Kant’s grand schematic model disturbed above all those poets and thinkers who
had been sensitized by the English Romantics and who sensed that Kant’s teaching
was built on the pillars of intellectualism. They had a different, more internalized
awareness of the world around them. They experienced nature’s processes more
profoundly and experienced their relationship to everything they encountered in the
world with a refined, highly poetic empathy. The words of lyricists such as Friedrich
Holderlin and Novalis appealed to quite different dimensions of perception than
those in Kant’s philosophical works. As Novalis writes:

Only the poets have understood what nature can be to man.... They find every­
thing in nature. They are the only ones familiar with its soul and their quest to
find in their surroundings the blessings of the golden age is not in vain.... They do
not know the powers they have at their disposal, the worlds that obey them. Is
it not true that the rocks and forests obey music and, tamed by her, follow every
command like domestic pets? Do not the most beautiful flowers grow near the
loved one and delight in adorning her? Do not the heavens become brighter for her
and the sea smoother? Does not all nature, like a face and its gestures, the pulse
and the colours, express the state of one of those higher, most wonderful beings
we call mankind? Does not a rock become strangely like you when I speak to it?
And how am I different from the stream when, full of melancholy, I gaze down
into its waves, and lose my thoughts in its murmurings.2

If, as Novalis writes, nature is understood as a great external world analogous to


the world of man, able to communicate with the forces of nature as if talking with a
brother or sister, then the Kantian ‘other’ disappears. This, in turn, brings us closer to
the idea we find when we look at Steiner: that mankind is the transcendental creator
of all these things. It was Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling who recognized
that the imaginative, inspirational and intuitive powers of art included the power to
combine inner and external creativity. This was a power from which we get an acute
sense of what creation is and of the forms it creates.

54
Schelling and Novalis were both very interested in artistic and philosophical
questions. They turned their attention to the phenomenon of a ‘secret capacity’ in
art linking the artistic process with nature’s creative processes. Schelling thought
that inside us lived a subconscious creative energy that we could not explain but
which was able to create, through various means, forms similar to those produced by
nature. According to Schelling, it had long been recognized that, ‘not everything in
art is consciously arranged’. There needed to be ‘a link between conscious activity and
subconscious energy’ for works comparable to those of nature to be created.3

Steiner turned this idea into the basis of his entire philosophy. Schelling’s thinking
on subconscious creative energy was still relatively imprecise and it was Steiner
who defined it more precisely as a form of thinking. In essence, his idea is as follows:
we are not the ones doing the thinking, but rather, as Steiner formulates it in The
Philosophy of Freedom, 1894, we live ‘by the grace of thought’.4Thinking is bigger and
more encompassing than mankind. It is a great cosmos of thinking that creates the
apparent world and, with it, mankind.

At the same time, however, mankind does not exist outside this all-encompassing
thinking but is enveloped by it. Man himself is a thinker. When we think something,
part of this invisible, world-structuring material lives in our inner activity. If we are
dealing with something material in the external world, then this external object is
also something we have originally conceived of. We would be unable to perceive and
recognize it if we could not first conceive of it.

This key allows us to unlock Steiner’s hieratic work, piece by piece, and reveal where
Beuys follows in his tracks. When, for example, Beuys says th in k in g = s c u l p t u r e ,
he has reduced Steiner’s philosophy to an ingenious short form. But here, thinking
means something other than a purely formal logic. Beuys and Steiner both agree that
thinking is much more than the rudiments we encounter in the intellect. It is, as
Schelling said in his talk about subconscious creative energy, a formative power. Its
imaginative side creates images, its inspirational side opens awareness to the world
of sound and in its intuitive aspect it is able to achieve form. Just as nature magically
creates a plant before our very eyes without us really knowing what is happening,
thinking creates the internal and external spaces in which we move.

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Originally thefoundation of everything was heat orfire ... not a primeval mist, dead mist,
but living heat was originally there.

Oxygen Nitrogen
Saturn Sun Moon Earth
Bird Fishes
Human Human Human Human
Animal Animal Animal
Plant Plant
Mineral

Rudolf Steiner
In the beginning there was heat, 30 June 19 2 4
C o l l e c t i o n o f R u d o lf S t e i n e r N a c h l a s s v e r w a l t u n g , D o r n a c h , S w i t z e r la n d

56
Jo se ph B euys
Letterfrom London, 1977
li t h o g r a p h , p aper, w o o d e n pan el
89 x 1 1 8 x 2 cm , ed, 1 1 5 p lus 15 AP
C o lle c tio n of Ju li u s H u m m e l, V ie n n a

57
Both Beuys and Steiner often spoke of imagination, inspiration and intuition as
‘higher forms of thinking’ and labelled them formative forces. Both were convinced
that such extended thinking would unveil the powers necessary to shape the future
of the earth.

We need to keep this background in mind if we want to understand the process of


communication with the public that took place when Steiner and Beuys presented
their ideas on a blackboard. Then we begin to see the emergence of the first traces of
this new thinking. The drawings, with their quickly executed lines, seem like heralds
of new creative energies. They embody traces of a living thought process through
which Beuys and Steiner developed and unfolded their visions for the future.

The great generator


One of the visions that Beuys and Steiner repeatedly projected into the intellectual
sphere was the image of evolution.

Steiner’s initial scientific interest in the principle of metamorphosis came from his
early editorial exposure to Goethe’s scientific writings. In the case of Beuys, it was
probably Steiner’s early writing that introduced him to the idea of evolution.

Steiner developed his metamorphosis idea in parallel processes of inward and


outward observation. Following in Goethe’s footsteps, he observed nature’s structural
transformations and found in them recurring developmental forms. This led him to
view the world’s development as a series of metamorphoses at the beginning of which
stood a divine, primeval formative principle. On occasion, Steiner connects this first
or primeval principle with the Kabbalah and names it after the primordial man,
Adam Kadmon (p. 65). The world emerges from out of this principle and takes on a
seven-stage developmental metamorphosis.

These are the seven ages of the world - Saturn, the sun, the moon, Earth, Jupiter,
Venus and Vulcan - in which the creation story is realized in the history of mankind.
The entire cosmic evolution, in essence, serves the perfection of mankind and the
development of the principle of freedom and responsibility.

Mankind, this all-encompassing being, ‘ejected’5 the cosmos from itself so as to


experience itself against this cosmos and to portray itself as creator of the world.
While the beginnings may lie in the murky depths of evolutionary history, mankind’s
existence always contained the origin. Such thinking helps explain why the scientist

58
Rudolf Steiner wanted to re-establish the natural sciences on an esoteric footing, i.e.
founded on observation of the inner world. When we study our own inner and external
development, we see before us the drama of the world’s history. Self-observation and
observation of the genesis of the self lead to the observation of the genesis of the world.
‘We dream of travelling through space’, wrote Novalis in 1797, ‘but is not the cosmos
in us? The depths of our spirit are unknown to us. The path of mystery leads inwards.
In us, or nowhere, is eternity, with its worlds - the past and the future.’6

The works on paper from the Van der Grinten Collection, Saturn, Mars, Earth (Erie),
Moon (Mond), 195^-53, and Cosmology (Kosmologie), 1951, reveal that Beuys began
exploring this subject early on. These works clearly need to be regarded as an early
confrontation with Rudolf Steiner’s cosmology. Later works led to the denser form
of the evolution scheme that we find time and again in the blackboards and that can
be understood as a certain concentration and intensification of Steiner’s evolution
idea. Steiner’s image of evolution spans a period from deep in the past into the future.
Beuys focused this image into a more manageable range so as to highlight the image’s
importance for the continuation of human development.

Probably the most comprehensive version found in a drawing is titled Evolution, 1974
(in the collection of Volker Harlan). It was drawn by Beuys in connection with a
lecture at the Anthroposophical Hibernia School in Wanne Eickel in 1974. The motive
had already appeared in the talks at documenta 5, 1972 in Kassel, in the discussions
with Volker Harlan, Rainer Rappmann and Peter Schata,7in an interview with Dieter
Koepplin from 1 December 1976,8 and in numerous other contexts, in particular
Beuys’ Letterfrom London, 1977 (p. 57).

Steiner’s and Beuys’ evolution drawings put mankind at the centre of the evolution
story. In a certain sense this represents a frontal attack on the worldview built on the
natural sciences and on humanity’s self portrayal. The Christian theodicy regards the
creation as an act of God’s eminence, while evolution theory talks of an immanent
material process of development. Steiner, however, traces evolutionary structural
transformation back to mankind. But if mankind is the Alpha and the Omega of
all development, then neither God nor nature is responsible for that development.
Responsibility falls to mankind.

At heart, Steiner’s and Beuys’ portrayals of evolution are calls to action, invitations
to take responsibility for human destiny in our own hands. Beuys is not unjustified
when he speaks of Richtkrdfte-, the evolution drawing in itself can be seen as an inner

59
'directive force’ that time and again embodied for him the dimensions of his actions.
Christ’s frequent appearance at the centre of Beuys’ and Steiner’s drawings reflects
the view of Christ as the embodiment of these transformational human powers, as the
necessary life energy and the 'directive force’ required for the world’s development.
Beuys makes the point even more strongly when he repeatedly makes Christ
responsible for the transformation of mankind from dependent being to creator:
Untitled (The inventor of the Steam Engine), 1971.

Directive forces (Of a new society) - or: Where is ELEMENT III?9


Both Beuys and Steiner were convinced of the necessity of transformation and each
wanted in his own way to encourage it and give it impetus. Their pedagogical activities
can only be understood against this background. Both taught because they wanted
to provide an impulse and inspiration. They wanted to be drivers, transformers and
energizers. The metaphors Beuys used were unambiguous.

Steiner could assume that, despite all the resistance he encountered, large-scale
change was possible. But faced with the developments in Anthroposophy as well as
in contemporary history, Beuys could only be disillusioned. Not with the ideas that
Steiner stood for, and not with the integrity with which he pursued his calling, but by
the fruits of his labours when seen against the destruction that history had produced.

Beuys witnessed World War II and the Holocaust. He was also confronted with the
erection of the Berlin Wall and the experience of the Cold War, the development of
nuclear weapons, the Korean War, the Cuban Missile Crisis and all the other events
that took the world to the brink of disaster. In response, he sensed that the time for
grand gestures had passed and totally different approaches were required if he wanted
to activate mankind’s powers of resistance and creativity.

This was probably one of the main reasons for his use of means that shocked his
contemporaries more than any hard-core art rebels could have, and with which he
revolutionized the art world. Richtkrafte belongs to these means.

Like Steiner, Beuys uses the blackboard as a teaching tool. But he uses it in a different,
more multi-layered manner. Steiner appeared in his lectures primarily as a teacher
and talented speaker, developing his line of thought in relative independence of
his listeners. For Beuys, however, the principle of dialogue was central and he
developed the blackboard drawings together with his public. The idea of the social
and discursive flows into the form of the blackboards quite differently from how it

60
Jo se ph B e u y s
Kadmon, 19 4 8 - 4 9
p e n c i l w i t h t ra c e s o f c o l o u r on p ap e r
29.2 x 23.3 cm
C o lle c tio n of M u s e u m Schloft M o y la n d (M SM 0 3 39 4 ), C o lle c tio n of van G ru ten

6l
does in Steiner's case. Beuys was familiar with the accusation of hermetism that is
frequently made against Anthroposophy and thought to overcome this with his idea
of the permanent conference.

With Beuys we also see a conscious dramatization and ritual that appeals not so much
to the audience’s attentive listening as to its active imagination and involvement.
While for Steiner the blackboards were merely teaching aids, for Beuys they became
tools and, as Shelley Sacks says, ‘instruments of consciousness’. Beuys often spoke of
an oscillation in the teacher/student relationship. For him, everyone was both teacher
and student.

For example, with the Richtkrafte in London Beuys set up three blackboards on easels.
While two of the blackboards were permanently in use, the third stood empty, like an
image of the openness in the process, a view of the unknown, of those spaces in which
we draw our own inner images. It is easy to see here the appeal to the imagination and
creativity of the active viewer and co-designer, whom Beuys was trying to activate
with images such as this.

As soon as one of the two other blackboards had been completed it was fixed before
Beuys threw it on the floor where, with time, a pile of blackboards arose. Each day the
pile grew higher. Here, too, we can see a variation on the image of evolution.

Beuys regarded the material he had just developed in cooperation with the participants
as the prerequisite for new discussions. Like the talks and discussions at documenta 5,
1972, the discussions during which the blackboards were created took place over
several weeks. The result was akin to the construction of a kind of thought platform
on which ever newer - higher - levels of thinking and structuring could be reached.
The image of blackboards strewn across the floor like black sheets of ice slowly
creating an ever more dense treasury of knowledge and wisdom is, in its own way, an
image not only of accumulation but also of evolution - creation as the development of
a new form drawn from a pre-existing structure.

If we consider the evolution of individual human thinking, we see that its


complexity develops primarily in the cycle of night and day. The experiences of the
day are processed during the night and during the next day these newly acquired
experiences serve as the foundations of further development. The same thing
happens with the blackboard drawings of Richtkrafte. As if from nothing, the bright
white thought traces of day appear against the night of the blackboard, before

62
disappearing into the mountain of ideas on the floor. Hegel once described our
consciousness as the ‘nocturnal shaft of intelligence’. We could also call it an endless
space in which the highest potentiality is organized, a room of endless possibilities
awaiting their realization, everything that is not yet extant, but which will
become real through action. This is the void that is everything, the hen kai pan, as
the pre-Socratics called it and that Plotinus termed, in probably its most beautiful
philosophical portrayal, The One. The blackboard drawings of Richtkrafte are akin to
the scales falling from the eyes of our living thinking, like coruscating stars in a rich
and multi-faceted thought firmament.

The principle of vertical and horizontal - day and night, life and death, death and
resurrection - that determines Richtkrafte has its justification here. In one sense it is
the underlying model of evolution itself that is being portrayed. So, on the one hand,
Richtkrafte is about extreme intensification and, on the other, it is a reflection on the
principle of teachings and the teacher. Richtkrafte reflects the possibilities of teaching
in our time.

Both Steiner’s blackboard drawings and Beuys’ buried blackboards represent and
embody directive forces. Beuys’ thinking may have penetrated ourthoughts, emotions
and desires more than we assume. Evoking living human thinking was one of the
main concerns of both Beuys and Steiner. It was Novalis who expected from an art
of the future a synthesis of philosophy and poetry, of art and thinking. With their
blackboard drawings Beuys and Steiner were among the first to bring this future
vision to life.

63
Notes

1. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations § 309. The quote in its entirety reads:
‘What is the objective of philosophy? To show the fly the way out of the fly-bottle.’
2. Novalis, Werke I, p. 223 f.
3. F.W.J Schelling, Uberdas Verhahnis derbildenden Kiinste zu derNatur, Felix Meiner Verlag, Hamburg,
1983, p. 13.
4. Rudolf Steiner, The Philosophy of Freedom, 1984, GA4.
5. The German term Steiner and Beuys use is heraussetzen, which literally means 'to put outside’.
6. Novalis, Werke II, p. 232.
7. Harlan, Rappmann, Schata, Soziale Plastik, Materialien zu Beuys, Achberger Verlag, Achberg, 1984,
third edition, p. 13 ff.
8. Joseph Beuys, The secret blockfor a secret person in Ireland, (exh, cat), Kunstmuseum Basel, 1977, p. 23 ff.
9. The title refers to the Action Manresa, 1966 in Diisseldorf. The third element Beuys is looking for here
(Beuys: ‘Where is ELEMENT III?’) is the active, attentive observer who is able to follow Beuys and his
intentions and who, in keeping with the extended concept of art, becomes active.

64
Adam Kadmon is not the same as Adam. He is a giant head that was once the earth.
This is a natural idea. Adam Kadmon only became an earth-flea when people could
no longer imagine that a human head could become as large as the earth, and when they no
longer believed in this; so then they made up the abnormal idea as though all this was a huge
joke, that the whole nine months run their course inside the mother’s body, and from
this maternal sphere the human being is then born. In reality we have to imagine that the
human being was once as large as the earth.

R u d o lf S t e i n e r
Adam Kadmon, 30 S e p t e m b e r 1922
C o l le c t i o n o f R u d o lf S t e in e r N a c h l a s s v e r w a l t u n g , D o r n a c h , S w i t z e r la n d

65
Jo se ph B e u y s ’ A c t io n at the In s titu t e for C o n t e m p o r a r y A rt , L o n d o n , 1974. Photo: G e r a ld Inc a nde la

66
Joseph B e u y s ’ A c t io n at the In s titu t e for C o n t e m p o r a r y A rt , Lo n d o n , 1974. Photo: G e r a ld I n c a n d e la

67
Jo se ph B e u y s ' Action of Celtic (Kinloch Rannoch) Schottische Symphonic E d i n b u r g h , 1970

68
Jo se ph B e u y s ’ A c t io n at the In s ti tu t e for C o n t e m p o r a r y A rt , Lo n d o n , 1974. Photo: G e r a ld Incandela

69
Jo se p h B e u y s
Directive forces (Richtkrdfte), 1 9 7 4 - 7 7 , b l a c k b o a r d no. 51
blackboard, chalk
N a t i o n a l g a l e r i e i m H a m b u r g e r B a h n h o f , B e rlin

70
Blackboards, sounding boards

Tom Nicholson

Beuys was there waiting everyday (exactly) at 12 noon when the gallery opened.
He spent all day in the gallery talking to whoever came in, writing on blackboards.
When he had filled a blackboard, he would pick it up and crash it down on to the
floor. People would then walk on the blackboards.1

Joseph Beuys’ work Directiveforces (Ofa new society) (Richtkrdfte (Einer neuen Gesellschaft)),
3:974—77, comprises traces of an extended action. For almost the entire exhibition Art
into Society, Society into Art in London in late 1974, Beuys was present in the gallery,
engaging in discussion about philosophy, politics and art with visitors.2 To explain
and elaborate his ideas, he wrote and drew on blackboards as the discussions evolved,
and the ‘blackboard drawings’ then served as traces of these exchanges.

Beuys had used blackboards in his teaching from the very beginning of his tenure
as Professor at the Staatliche Kunstakademie in Diisseldorf.3 He had also used a
blackboard in his first known performance, Siberian Symphony First Movement
(Sibirische Symphonie 1. Satz), 1963, and the blackboard remained an important part of
Beuys’ performance work through the 1960s and into the r970S. In Celtic (Kinloch
Rannoch) Schottische Symphonie, performed in Edinburgh in 1970, and Celtic + \A/W ,
performed in Basel on 7 April r97i, Beuys produced numerous drawings, erasing each
before producing the next, using a single blackboard, which was moved around the space.

When Beuys’ work began to shift towards more directly political activity in the early
1970s, he began to produce ‘lecture actions’, where he presented his political and
philosophical ideas to an audience and/or engaged in discussion while drawing and
writing on blackboards, which later served as traces of these actions. The centrality
of the blackboard in these works reflected the extent to which this activity grew out
of his teaching work, but also underlined the conceptual links between this political
work and his earlier performances. Amongst the earliest lecture actions were those
held in Naples on 13 November 1971, and in London at the Tate Gallery and the
Whitechapel Gallery on consecutive days - 25 and 26 February r972.4 In June 1972, at
documenta 5 in Kassel, these ‘lecture actions’ first assumed the ambitious scale which
characterizes Richtkrdfte. Beuys took up Harald Szeemann’s invitation to participate
in documenta 5 with the Officefor Direct Democracy by Referendum (Biiro der Organisation
fu r direkte Demokratie durch Volksabstimmung). He established an organising office
for political activism in the Fridericianum, the exhibition’s main venue, engaging
visitors to the exhibition in discussions about his political and philosophical ideas
for one hundred consecutive days, simultaneously producing innumerable diagrams,
texts and drawings on blackboards.

71
Beuys’ ideas were influenced by the work of Rudolf Steiner, whose lectures also
provided a precedent for the form of Beuys' lecture actions. It was through the lecture
actions that Steiner's influence on Beuys was most explicitly articulated. Four of the
blackboards from the extended action Biiro der Organisation fur direkte Demokratie
durch Volksabstimmung at documenta 5 were included in Beuys’ The Capital Space (Das
Kapital Raum, 1970-1977), 1980, (pp. 78-79) which comprises forty-nine blackboard
drawings and is the only other installation of blackboards that Beuys produced on
a scale comparable to Richtkrafte, 1974-77. The fourth blackboard from Das Kapital
Raum, bearing the title Free Democratic Socialism (Freier demokratischer Sozialismus),
makes direct reference to Steiner’s tripartite articulation of self and collective
determination: freedom in the cultural sphere, democracy in the sphere of law, and
socialism in the economic sphere.

The focus of this essay, however, is not on the political ideas that Beuys expounded
through his lecture actions but on the formal and sculptural relationships established
in Richtkrafte, and the relationship of this work to the action of which it is a trace. It is
a way to establish a political reading of the work around what it manifests in formal
terms, rather than around its rhetorical content.

Beuys’ action Richtkrafte at the Institute for Contemporary Art (ICA) is recorded
in numerous photographs, which, like many that document his lecture actions,
invariably focus on the artist himself. But these still images cannot capture the chaos
- notably the vocal chaos - which characterizes most of Beuys’ lecture actions. By
contrast, a short film by the British film-maker Ken McMullen, documenting Beuys’
eight-hour long Tate lecture action in February 1972,5 is fragmentary in quality,
though what is evident is a highly mobile situation where Beuys and the audience
intermingle in a way that is certainly not always the case with his later lecture
actions. Beuys moves backward and forward between exchanges with the audience,
often apparently contested, to involve a variety of people at once, as he writes and
draws on the blackboards. As the term ’lecture action’ might suggest, the blackboard
drawings do not emerge through the process of lecturing, but are instead indexical to
a process of exchange. In McMullen’s film, Beuys is always intensely engaged. When
he speaks, he gestures to explain more clearly; he moves to the blackboards to add
another word or arrow, or he nods his head vigorously to emphasize another point.
His voice strains at certain points in the film, and we are intensely aware of speech as
a physical function of the body. The film shows that he is often surrounded by a dense
mass of people, who crowd around to listen or interject. These conditions both invade
and intensify our awareness of the physicality of Beuys’ actions. This feature of the

72
action impressed The Guardian's critic Caroline Tisdall, who wrote in her review:

Beuys’ physical feat was awe-inspiring. He was there against the blackboards on
which he expounded layer after layer of his theories, all day and never leaving
the gallery. He paused only for a few seconds to gulp a mouthful of coffee and a
sandwich.6

This gruelling duration, and Beuys’ physical endurance, is what the British sculptor
Antony Gormley, then a young artist, remembers most vividly about Beuys’ lecture
action at the ICA in 1974.7 In both the Tate action in r972 and the ICA action in r974,
the duration of the action emphasized its physicality. In Richtkrafte, it is difficult to
clearly make out any single diagram or text. Instead, we are confronted with layers
of marks so we contemplate the blackboards as palimpsests - aggregations of marks
which are indexical to the evolution of a discussion. We read the web of lines and
words in temporal and sensual terms rather than in literal terms. The blackboard
drawings convey, above all, the physical density of the action as well as its temporal
duration-involving hundreds of people, their speaking, listening and thinking, over
many weeks.

The importance of the blackboard in Beuys’ work, in sculptural terms, is made clear
by both the footage shot by McMullen and the still images taken during Beuys’ ICA
action. It is also highlighted by his stiffness on the few occasions when the blackboard
was absent.8For the Neapolitan gallerist Lucio Amelio, Beuys’ speaking and drawing
were inseparable: ‘Beuys always used to draw when he was speaking. There was no
speech without drawing’.9 In McMullen’s film, each exchange provides the form for
an addition to the blackboard, and each addition provides a path to further exchange.
The lecture action is a collective syntax generated by this interdependence.

In the installation Richtkrafte, we are conscious of the blackboards as residues of this


process of exchange. The horizontal orientation of all but three of the blackboards
marks them as an aftermath, and figures them as a kind of ruin. Beuys articulates a
central sculptural problem - the relationship between the sculpture and its ground
- in relation to the properties of the trace. This is a persistent trope in Beuys’ work
and is, in part, a natural corollary of the ephemeral nature of performance work. It
is also a longstanding feature of the sculptural language, built around processes of
compression and activation, which Beuys had begun to develop in the 1960s. Indeed,
in several key works, Beuys makes the process of generating traces internal to an
action, or performance. This is seen, perhaps most acutely, in his Ausfegen, r972,

73
where the act of collecting traces - sweeping up the rubbish after a May Day rally in
West Berlin - becomes the action itself. This idea is also characteristic of the lecture
actions, where the blackboards serve as traces after the actions - as in the installation
Richtkrafte - but also within the actions, allowing participants in the discussions to
follow the development of ideas. In the case of Beuys’ IC A action, as Rosenthal’s words
at the beginning of this essay indicate, the blackboards accumulate on the floor of the
gallery as the action unfolds.

Charles Merewether has written that a ‘paradoxical condition’ constitutes the


structure of the trace: ‘It is retroactive, subject to a certain departure, to a leaving
behind in order for memory to be produced, and therefore opens itself to a future
because it remains to be seen - can only be seen - and therefore understood, after
the fact’.10 The sculptural language of Richtkrafte is articulated specifically through
the double character of the trace. The blackboard drawings are retrospective - traces
of acts of thinking and speech - and their function is mnemonic. But they are also
propositions, dealing almost always with the future, specifically with future
transformations of our understanding and organization of social formations. Often
these blackboards contain diagrammatic structures, linking ideas and processes, and
we follow the course of these lines like maps for these future transformations. The
blackboards are what remains, but they are also what goes forward into the future.
The retrospective and the prospective, the residual and the potential, are tightly
hound together.

Beuys’ work often articulates itself through sound, specifically through the physical
processes of both creating sound through vocalization and receiving sound through
hearing. These processes find some echo in the precarious physical existence of the
blackboard drawings themselves, always teetering on the edge of the same oblivion
into which spoken words are cast. Beuys’ interest in these processes of vocalizing
is evident in the recurrence of non-verbal sounds in his work, like ‘o o’, or absurd
repetitions of sounds like ‘ja, ja, ja, ja, ja, nee, nee, nee, nee, nee’ (an example of
which appears in this exhibition). Beuys added the words ‘6 6’ in neon-tuhing to
residues of the Bum der Organisation fu r direkte Demokratie durch Volksabstimmung,
his most sustained blackboard-based work, undertaken at documenta 5 in r972, and
the resulting work, the installation 0 0, T972-81, links the processes of the blackboard
drawings in his lecture actions with the process of creating abstract sounds. The
same link is present in this exhibition: ‘6 6’ appears on two blackboards of Richtkrafte
(p. 70). In the film Transformer, Beuys describes this interest in non-verbal sound: ‘If you
enlarge the understanding of sculpture to the point where it has to do above all with

74
Jo se p h B e u y s ’ A c t io n at Lu cio A m e l i o ’s M o d e r n A r t A g e n c y , N aples, 1 9 7 1 . Photo: Ute K lo p h a u s

75
human thought, then the embodiment of this thought in sound and language becomes
part of art’.12

In photos of Beuys’ ICA action, and in McMullen’s film of the Tate lecture action, we
are made conscious of how the processes of drawing and vocalizing are interrelated.
In a critical passage in his performance Celtic + W V V , undertaken in Basel about nine
months before the Tate lecture action, Beuys moves forward on his front through a
thick crowd, pushing a blackboard with a stick. Alternately he draws pictographic
signs for particular sounds, vocalizes them, moves forward again, erases the sign,
draws a new one, vocalizes it, and so on. Both drawing and vocalizing are presented as
the materialization of thinking. Drawing is the trace of a process of materialization,
giving a visible form to thinking processes.15 It also provides instruction towards a
second process, that of vocalization. In Beuys’ ICA action, Richtkrafte, the blackboard
drawings fulfil a similar function to this role in Celtic + w w . They are traces of two
parallel processes of materialization (from thinking into drawing and from thinking
into vocalizing). As they are read they also re-enter the same chain of processes of
thinking and materializing of which the blackboards are a trace. Amelio perceptively
identified this character of the blackboards in Beuys’ lecture actions by using musical
terminology:

The concept of a ‘Partitur’ is a musical term that evolved for him while he was in
Fluxus. He spoke via a Partitur, a list of ideas. Later, when he was lecturing, he used
blackboards. A blackboard is just a large Partitur, meant to be seen by many people
at the same time.14

In the installation Richtkrafte, blackboards retain the prospective character of a Partitur.


They are materializations themselves, but they also provide instructions towards
further materializations. The work yields no aural information but articulates sound
as what might be imagined from the work, as its yet-to-be.

Richtkrafte figures its political meaning through sound, specifically sound as


emblematic of processes of forming and becoming. The most convincing parts of
Beuys’ very extensive and erratic political theories were extrapolations from sculptural
and drawing processes of forming into the sphere of political action.15 The major
corollary of these extrapolations was Beuys’ widely-quoted assertion that ‘Jeder Mensch
ist Kunstler’, or ‘Every person is an artist’. In archival television news footage of his 1972
action in Kassel, the Biiro der Organisationfu r direkte Demokratie durch Volksahstimmung,
we hear him assert to a visitor: ‘Now I can talk to everyone about art. I can talk to them

76
as creative people, because I believe that every person is a creative person’.16 It is a view
that we often hear quoted or paraphrased in accounts of the work, though here it is
significant because Beuys links his assertion to the form of the w o rk -the act of talking
individually to each person as they enter the office.

Similarly, Beuys’ ICA action constitutes a chain of small-scale, usually individual,


exchanges. In most cases, and unlike the Tate lecture actions, there is no audience
outside the interlocutor or interlocutors. In this respect, Beuys’ ICA action is
perhaps closer to teaching (at least to certain traditions of teaching, including art
school teaching), which, according to Beuys, should be understood as a process of
exchange.17 This process is a way of manifesting, in concrete terms, his proposition
that everyone is an artist. It is articulated formally, not simply rhetorically. The focus
and registration of the process is the blackboard drawing, as both an instrument of
exchange and as its trace:

The blackboard is not a means which is used in a studio. It only appears in a dialogue,
principally. There is no blackboard which was done only with the idea of making
a blackboard. Any blackboard which exists was done in a kind of performance, or
dialogue, with many people.18

Beuys’ use of blackboards was a system for the distribution of ideas and his blackboard
drawings repeatedly allude to systems of circulation, bodily, economic and intellectual.
The drawings, too, insistently return to circular structures in their formal organization.
As a system of distribution, Beuys’ use of blackboards can be seen as anti-cinematic.
This formal opposition between the blackboard drawing and cinema is evident in
several key works, such as Das Kapital Raum, 1970-1977, and Celtic (Kinloch Rannoch)
Schottische Symphonie, 1970, where the matte black of the blackboard’s surface and the
reflective white surface of the film screen are set against one another. Beuys also figures
this opposition temporally. Cinema operates through a succession of still images, where
one image always replaces another. The blackboard drawings also depend on duration,
but through aggregation, with each new mark accumulating alongside the previous
one. Duration manifests itself archaeologically, as a kind of stack, a principle which
becomes the organizing structure of the installation Richtkrafte.

These formal differences are also a political difference. Deleuze has observed that it
is the way film unfurls through the movement I have described in lieu of a stream
of consciousness, which enables it to transform its viewers into ‘spiritual automata’.19
It is part of its pacifying capacity.20 On the other hand, it is the way the blackboards

77
function through duration, and in relation to processes of individuated exchange,
which demands the active involvement of their ‘viewers’. Indeed, the layering of
marks, which is a function of duration in the blackboards, is precisely indexical to this
involvement. The massing of forms articulates both duration and a collective character,
or more specifically, a collective potential. The basalt blocks, which Beuys stacked as
a massive wedge shape outside the Fridericianum in Kassel as part of his work 7,000
Oaks (7,000 Eichen), 1982, figured this collective potential as the distribution of those
forms into the social field. Over the following five years the wedge slowly dispersed as
one block was planted alongside each of the 7,000 oak trees in and around Kassel. The
blackboards of Richtkrafte figure this potential as a related distribution, a distribution
of ideas into the social field.

Earlier, I described the physically gruelling nature of Beuys’ ICA lecture action, and
many of his other lecture actions. The blackboard drawings are an important part of that
physicality. They record the duration of the action through an accumulation of marks.
They also manifest a process of materialization, where thinking becomes physical, and
where drawing and vocalising are figured as closely related. But it is important that the
blackboards also disrupt the physical space of the action. As I have already described,
the major subject of the lecture actions is the future, or, more specifically, future
transformations, and in this sense the blackboards are cues to an imaginative space,
outside the physical space of the action itself. Physicality is at once asserted and dislocated.

I have described how, in Beuys’ lecture actions, speaking provides the form for drawing
and drawing provides an articulation of Beuys’ speaking. This interdependence is the
structure of the lecture actions. It is also the structure of their ontology: propositions
are not simply described, they are manifested as actions - specifically, actions which are
processes of formation - in a field of collectivity. This implies a specific relationship
to the future. Propositions must also be enactments. At an ontological level, this
relationship to the future sets itself against a powerful model, the economic system
which shaped the political context in which Beuys worked.

Beuys’ work evolved in the context of the West German ‘economic miracle’. This
economic miracle was specifically consumerist, and amnesiac in its relationship to
Germany’s National Socialist past. It was manifested in massmedia image forms like
cinema and television, but above all in advertising. The impact of this advertising - with
its proliferating images of consumerist utopias - can be measured in the prominence
and peculiar shape of German Pop Art at this time, most notably in the work of artists
like Wolf Vostell, Sigmar Polke, and Gerhard Richter. We know that Beuys was deeply

78
interested in mass media forms and, specifically, in ways to democratize them. Even
in 1970, when Beuys had the chance to talk briefly with Willi Brandt, the recently-
elected Chancellor, it was the 'liberation of the media’ which he pressed upon Brandt,
proposing that television spaces should be given over to artists once a month for
‘true opposition’.11 The mass media and its ‘manipulation’ - which we might also
describe as its dissemination of utopian fantasy worlds - was a significant topic of
Beuys’ lecture actions throughout the 1970s. And Beuys’ lecture actions, like his ICA
action in 1974, were a way of distributing ideas. This distribution occurred through
verbal exchanges, the individuation and reciprocal structure of which were, as I
have described earlier, anti-cinematic, but also implicitly opposed to methods of
mass media distribution like television. More significantly, the lecture actions were
a way of embedding the distribution of ideas into exchange, and into a network of
interdependence with action, specifically, actions of materializing thought into
physicality. They manifested their propositions as a resistance to the passivity induced
by the utopian images of advertising.

It is now more than thirty years since Beuys’ ICA action. Richtkrafte appears in its
temporary situation at the National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne as the relic
of a distant time and place. As a form, it retains some force as a proposition that is
manifested formally, in sculptural terms, not simply rhetorically. It is partly social in
its address. The work articulates a specific mode of distributing information, and a
process of imagining and deliberating on future forms. The proposition of the work
also turns on art itself. It reaches back into the tradition of drawing - with its history of
annotation, preparatory sketches, speculative marks, even architectural planning - as
a way of materializing thinking, and specifically as a way of designating future forms.
It also reaches for an expansion of these processes - the materializing of thinking
and imagination into processes of formation - into every realm of human activity.
As we encounter Richtkrafte, complex processes of looking, reading and imagining
unfold. The installation - like the action of which the work is a residue - generates
a complex action of thinking and imagination - a series of processes of coming into
being, reiterations of the processes by which the work itself came into being. These
processes are the work’s political charge. Within Beuys’ political context, they stood
against an amnesiac consumerism and the rigid ideological positions of the Cold War
(and their respective utopias), but especially against the spectres of militarism and the
cataclysmic destruction of nuclear war. Contemporary Melbourne seems distant from
that time. But our context - a twenty-first-century consumerism entangled with the
spectre of an omnipresent and endless ‘war on terror’ - is perhaps another space in
which Richtkrafte sounds us out again.

79
Joseph Beuys
Das Kapital Room, 1 9 7 0 - 7 7
d im e n s i o n s v a r ia b le
H a l le n f u r N e ue K u n s t , S c h a f f h a u s e n ,
S w i t z e r la n d
Photo: In g e S a u e r y , C o u r t e s y
R a s s m u l l e r C o l le c t i o n
Jo se p h B e u y s
Das KapitalRoom, 1 9 7 0 - 7 7
dimensions variable
Fallen fur Neue Kunst, Schaffhausen,
Switzerland
Photo: I n g e S a u e r y , C o u r t e s y
R a s s m i i lle r C o l le c t i o n
Notes

1. Norman Rosenthal recounted his memories of Beuys' contribution to the exhibition at the ICA at
a symposium on 23 November 2003 at Whitechapel Gallery in London, organized as part of the
exhibition A Short History of Performance Part II.
2. The exhibition ran from 30 October to 24 November 1974. Beuys was present from 29 October to 2
November, and from 7 November to 17 November (Monika Angerbauer-Rau, Beuys Kompass: Eine
Lexikon zu den Gesprdchen von Joseph Beuys, Dumont Buchverlag, Cologne, 1998, p. 147.
3. Mario Kramer, Joseph Beuys Das Kapital Raum 1970-1977, Edition Staeck, Heidelberg, 1991, p. r95.
4. Interestingly, the blackboard drawings which were generated during the Tate Gallery action, Four
blackboards, 1972, were originally stored as part of the Tate Archive and only moved into the Tate
Collection proper several years later, in the late 1970s. This suggests that the status of the lecture
actions were, even in 1972, not entirely clear, at least to the Tate Gallery. See records in the Tate
Archive, London.
5. Ken McMullen, Documentary on Beuys’ work in London, 1972,16mm film, black and white, 10 minutes,
distributed by Lux, London, held by the Tate Gallery Archive, London.
6. Caroline Tisdall, ‘Review of Fat Transformation Piece’, The Guardian, Monday 28 February 1972, p. 411.
7. Interview with Antony Gormley, BBC Four documentary televised on 28th February 2005. Martina
Hall, Joseph Beuys and me, TSI Post-productions, 2005 (V0719).
8. For example, when Beuys spoke without a blackboard in his globally televised address at the opening
of documenta 6 in 1977 he seemed awkward and stiff. The video of this speech is held in the Documenta
Archiv, Kassel (V 1985/25).
9. Lucio Amelio in Pamela Kort, 'An Interview with Lucio Amelio', in Lynne Cooke & Karen Kelly (eds),
Joseph Beuys Arena - Dove sarei arrivato sefossi stato intelligente - Where I would have got if I had been
intelligent, DIA Centre for the Arts, New York, 1994, p. 35.
10. Charles Merewether, 'Alasting impression', in Tony Bond, Sophie Forbat, Karen Jackson & Michael
Wardell (eds), Trace (exh. cat.), Liverpool Biennial of Contemporary Art and Tate Gallery Liverpool,
Liverpool, 1999, p. 165.
11. Coyote III, 1984, performed with Nam June Paik in the Seibu Museum of Art, Tokyo, on 2 June 1984
(see Uwe M. Schneede, Joseph Beuys Die Aktionen: Kommentiertes Werkverzeichnis mitfotografischen
Dokumentationen, Verlag Gerd Hatje, Stuttgart, 1994, p. 369).
12. Beuys in John Halpern, Joseph Beuys Transformer, 1979, VHS PAL, 60 minutes, colour, sound, held in the
Documenta Archiv, Kassel.
13. Beuys spoke eloquently on this process: ‘A drawing is the first visible form in my work, the first visible
form of the thought, the changing point from the invisible powers to the visible thing. It’s really a
special kind of thought brought down on to a surface, be it flat or rounded, be it a solid support like a
blackboard or a flexible thing like paper, leather, or parchment, or whatever kind of surface ... even a
wall’ (Beuys in Bernice Rose, Thinking is Form: The Drawings of Joseph Beuys’, Interview Dusseldorf
18 June 1984, in MOMA Magazine, Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1993, p. 17).
14. Amelio in Kort, ‘An Interview with Lucio Amelio’, p. 35.
15. 'Drawing for me already exists in the thought. If the complete invisible means of thinking are not in a
form, it will never result in a good drawing. My thinking on drawing as a special form of materialized
thought is this: they are the beginning of changing the material condition of the world, through
sculpture, architecture, mechanics, or engineering for instance, where drawing ends not only with
the traditional artist’s concept.... [My theory] is related to everybody's creativity, to the constituents
of everybody's productivity. Creativity is no longer specific to people who are working with colours,
to painters; it’s no longer specific to people who are working with form, to sculptors. Everybody’s
formulation and environments - let’s also say social relationships - have to be seen from the point
of view of creativity, of art, and the principle of form’ (Beuys in Rose, ‘Thinking is Form’, in. MOMA
Magazine, p. 17).

82
16. See Pia Witzmann (ed.), Joseph Beuys documenta-Arbeit: Eine Videodokumentation, VHS video, sound,
produced for the exhibition Joseph Beuys documenta-Arbeit, held in the Documenta Archiv, Kassel.
17. ‘[T]he teacher-pupil relationship must be changed from the notion that the one who is informed is
the teacher and the pupil is merely a listener. It should not be assumed as a matter of course that the
pupil is less capable than the teacher. For this reason the teaching-learning relationship must be
totally open and constantly reversible ...’ (Beuys as quoted in Gotz Adriani, Winfried Konnertz & Karin
Thomas, Joseph Beuys: Life and works, trans. Patricia Lech, Barron’s Education Series, Woodbury, New
York, 1979; originally published as Joseph Beuys: Leben und Werk, Verlag M. DuMont Scauberg, Cologne,
1 9 7 3 . p- 223).

18. Beuys in Rose, ‘Thinking is Form’, p. 22.


19. Gilles Deleuze, as quoted in Boris Groys, ‘Iconoclasm as an artistic device/ Iconoclastic strategies in
film’, in Bruno Latour & Peter Weibel (eds), Iconoclash: Beyond the image wars in science, religions and art
(exh. cat.), ZKM Centre for Art and Media, Karlsruhe, 2002, p. 285.
20. Groys,'Iconoclasm’, p. 287.
21. Beuys, 4 May 1970, as quoted in Adriani, Konnertz & Thomas, Beuys, p. 199.

83
Jo se p h B e u y s
Zinc boxes, one covered with sulphur (Tamponed corner)
(Mil Schwefel uherzogene Zinkkiste (Tamponierte Ecke)), 1970
Photo: P e d r a g C a n c a r
P r i v a te c o l le c t i o n , M e lb o u r n e

84
Science: ‘I am knowledge. But what I am has no existence.’
Art: ‘I amfantasy. But what I am has no truth.’

Rudolf Steiner
Science and art, 7 D e c e m b e r 1923
C o l le c t i o n of R u d o lf S t e i n e r N a c h l a s s v e r w a l t u n g , D o r n a c h , S w i t z e r la n d

85
Before the human being attaches himself to the physical world through the embryo he draws
to himself theforces of the etheric world. Here on the earth we live in the physical world,
which is the world we experience through our senses and grasp through our earthly intellect.
But in this world there is nothing that is not immersed in the etheric world.

Rudolf Steiner
The etheric world, 26 May 1922
Collection of Rudolf Steiner Nachlassverwaltung, Dornach, Switzerland

86
That is what is so extraordinary about all we have on Earth: the spiritual must
always have a physical carrier. The materialists consider only the physical carrier
andforget what is spiritual.

R u d o lf S t e i n e r
The materialists, n J u n e 1 9 2 4
C o l le c ti o n of R u d o lf S t e in e r N a c h l a s s v e r w a l t u n g , D o r n a c h , S w i t z e r la n d

87
L e t t e r f r o m J o s e p h B e u y s to M a n f r e d S c h r a d i
D u sseld o rf, 2 1 O ctober 19 7 1

Joseph Beuys

S e h r g e e h r t e r , l ie b e r H e r r S c h r a d i , D e a r H err Schradi,

es lie g e n n o c h e tw a 1 0 0 0 u n b e a n t w o r t e t e A n f r a g e n I still h a v e a ro u n d 10 0 0 u n a n sw e r e d q uestions


vo r m ir . E n t s c h u l d i g e n Sie bitte d e s w e g e n , dass before me. So p lease accept m y apologies i f I keep
diese A n t w o r t z u n a c h s t n ic h t tie fer e in g e h e n this a n sw e r brief. But please be assured: y o u r w ords
k a n n . N e h m e n Sie a b e r bitte e ntg e g e n : i h r e W o rte were v e r y m o v in g as they b r o u g ht to m in d the
h a b e n m i c h t ie f b e r i ih r t , w e il Sie m i r d a m i t den n a m e o f R u d o lf Steiner. S ince m y ch ild h o od I have
N a m e n R u d o l f S t e i n e r s z u r i e f e n , f iber d en ic h seit freq u e n tly th o u g h t of h i m because, as I k now, he
m e i n e r K i n d h e i t i m m e r w i e d e r n a c h d e n k e n m u ss, g ave m e the task of gradually, and in m y o w n way,
w e il , w i e ic h w e is s , gerad e v o n i h m e in A u f t r a g r e m o v i n g m a n k i n d ’s se p ara tio n from a nd m istrust
an m i c h e r g i n g , auf meine Weise den M e n s c h e n die o f the su p ern atu ral. In the field of p olitical thou gh t,
E n t f r e m d u n g u nd das M i s s t r a u e n g e g e n iib e r dem the road I h a ve to hoe every day, it is im po rta n t to
U b e r s i n n l i c h e n n a c h u n d n a c h w e g z u r a u m e n . Im realize the t ripartite d ivisio n as soon as possible.
p o l it i s e h e n D e n k e n , d e m A c k e r , d en ic h t a g l ic h T h is idea h a s to be d r a w n o u t o f p eo p le b e cau se it
z u b e a r b e i t e n h a b e , g i l t es, d ie D r e i g l i e d e r u n g is, to va r y in g degrees, present in every individ ual.
so s c h n e ll w i e m o g l i c h W i r k l i c h k e i t w e r d e n People h a ve to create it freely t h em selves. Steiner’s
zu l a s s e n . D ies e Idee m u s s aus d en M e n s c h e n greatest a ch ie v e m e n t w as not to h a ve ‘i n ve n te d ’
h e r a u s g e h o l t w e r d e n , d a sie i n j e d e m e in z e ln e n a n y th in g , but rath er {only.I) to have bro u ght to light
in v e r s c h ie d e n e m G ra d e v o r g e b ild e t ist. Sie m u s s m a n k i n d ’s d eep lo n g i n g for increased a w areness,
e r s t e h e n a ls die freie L e i s t u n g des M e n s c h e n even w h e n t hey are not c ognisant of it.
se lb st. Die grosse L e i s t u n g S t e i n e r s ist es g e w e s e n ,
g a r n i c h t s , e r f u n d e n ‘ z u h a b e n , s o n d e r n ( nur/) aus Tenderness, indirectness, incons p ic u o u sn e ss , along
d er u n e n d l i c h g e s t e i g e r t e n W a h r n e h m u n g h e r a u s w ith 'anti-techn iq u es’ are my p ossibilities. Not an
v o r g e t r a g e n zu h a b e n , w a s des M e n s c h e n h oh e re o verloa d o f ‘A n th r o p o s o p h ic a l M u se u m ’. For m a n y
S e h n s u c h t ist, w e n n er es a u ch noch nicht w e is s, people, i n c lu d in g m yself, our e xp eriences o f the
[Anth roposoph ical] ‘ so c ie ty ’ h ave been less than
B ehutsam keit, Indirektheit, U n m erk lich k eit, aber c o n v in c in g , e v e n bad. A n d I k n o w a ll t oo w e ll the
a u c h oft < A n tite c h n ik e n > s in d meine M o g lic h - su sp ic io n , e v e n abh o rre nce , o f far too m a n y people.
k e it e n . N i c h t ein U b e r f l u t e n m it <a nth ro po so -
p h i s c h e m M u s e u m x D e n n m i t d er [ A n t h r o p o so - W h e r e this m istrust has got even just a foot in
p h is c h e n ] < G e se llsc h aft> h a b e n s e h r viele, au ch the door, p eo p le are h a p p y to t h r o w o u t the ba b y
ich se lb st, n i c h t recht i ib e r z e u g e n d e , u m n i c h t zu w ith the bath water. T h e n w e are blind to the o nly
s a g e n iible E r f a h r u n g e n g e m a c h t . U n d ic h k e n n e zu feasible path.
gut das M i s s t r a u e n , ja s o g a r den E k e l a llz u vieler.
W ith best regards,
W o d ie se s M i s s t r a u e n a u ch n u r g a n z g e r i n g
E i n g a n g g e f u n d e n h a t, ist m a n i m m e r bereit, den Your Joseph B euys
S c h a t z m i t dem U n w e r t z u s a m m e n z u w e r f e n u nd
zu u er w e r fen . D a n n a b e r w i r d m a n b l i n d f u r d en
e in z i g g a n g b a r e n W eg.

M i t h e r z l ic h e n G r i i s s e n
Ih r J o se p h B e u y s

Fir st p u b li s h e d in D ie t e r K o e p p l i n ,
Joseph Beuys: Piastische Bilder 1947-1970 (exh. cat.),
G a le r ie der S tad t K o r n w e s t h e i m , V e r la g Gerd Hatje,
S t u t t g a r t , 19 9 0 , p. 3 1 .

88
Jo se p h B e u y s ’ Directive forces (Rich tkrdfte), 19 7 4 - 7 7 at N a t i o n a l g a l e r i e i m H a m b u r g e r B a h n h o f , B e rlin , 1977

89
A n a p p e a l to th e G e r m a n n a tio n a n d th e c iv iliz e d w o rld , M a r c h 1 9 19

Rudolf Steiner

The German people believed that its imperial A very great deal depends upon the German people’s
structure, erected half a century ago, would last objective discernment of this fact. The insight which
for an unlimited time. In August 1914, it felt that has remained hidden for the past fifty years should
the imminent catastrophe of war would prove this emerge during these calamitous times. In place of
structure invincible. Today, only its ruins are left. trivial thinking about immediate requirements,
After such an experience retrospection is in order, a broader view of life should now appear, which
for this experience has proved the opinions of half strives with powerful thinking to recognize modern
a century, especially the dominant thoughts of humanity’s evolutionary forces, and is courageously
the war years, to be tragically erroneous. What are dedicated to them. The petty attempts to neutralize
the reasons behind this erroneous thinking? This all those who pay heed to these evolutionary forces
question must induce retrospection in the minds of must cease. The arrogance and superciliousness
the German people. Its potentiality for life depends of those who imagine themselves to be practical,
on whether the strength exists for this kind of self- but whose practicality is the disguised narrow­
examination. Its future depends on whether it can mindedness which has in fact induced the calamity,
earnestly ask the following question: how did we must cease. Attention should be paid to what those
fall into error? If the German nation asks itself this who are decried as idealists, but who in reality are
question today, it will realize that it established an the practical ones, have to say about the evolutionary
Empire half a century ago, but omitted to assign to needs of modern times.
this Empire the mission which corresponds to the
inner essence of its people. ‘Practical’ people of every persuasion have seen the
advent of new human demands for a long time. But
The Empire was established. At first it was occupied they wanted to deal with these demands within the
with bringing its inner life into harmony with framework of the old traditional thought-habits and
the requirements of tradition and the new needs institutions. Modern economic life has produced
which developed from year to year. Later, efforts these demands. To satisfy them by means of private
were directed toward consolidating and enlarging initiative seemed impossible. The transfer of private
the outward power structure, which was based on enterprise to community enterprise in some cases
material strength. At the same time, means were appeared necessary to a certain class of people;
employed which were directed at the social demands and this was carried out where they thought it was
of the day - in some cases appropriate to the needs - useful. Radical transfer of all individual enterprise
but which lacked the larger goal which should have to community enterprise was the goal of another
resulted from knowledge of the evolutionary forces class which was not interested in retaining the
to which mankind must direct itself. Therefore, the customary private objectives in the new economy.
Empire was placed in the world without a substantial
goal to justify its existence. The war-catastrophe All the efforts relating to the new requirements
revealed this fact in a tragic way. Previous to the which have been made until now have one thing in
war's outbreak, those in the non-German world could common. They strive toward the socialization of the
see nothing in the conduct of the Empire’s affairs private sector and reckon with it being taken over
which could lead them to think that its authorities by the communities (state, municipality), which
were fulfilling a historic mission that should not be have developed from conditions which have nothing
swept away. The fact that these authorities did not to do with present requirements. Or, they reckon
encounter such a mission necessarily engendered an with newer kinds of communities (cooperatives, for
attitude in the non-German world which was, to one example), which are not fully in harmony with these
who has a real insight, the more profound reason for new requirements, having been copied from the old
the German downfall. forms using traditional thought-habits.

90
The truth is that no form of community which Already today one can scientifically substantiate
corresponds to these old thought-habits can cope and develop in detail what has been said here about
with such requirements. The forces of the times the social organism’s needs. In this presentation
are pressing for knowledge of a social structure for only a general indication can be given for all those
mankind which is completely different from who wish to pursue them.
what is commonly envisaged. Social communities
hitherto have, for the most part, been formed by The German Empire was founded at a time when
human instincts. To penetrate their forces with full these needs were converging on mankind. Its
consciousness is a mission of the times. administrators did not understand the need for
setting the Empire’s mission accordingly. A view
The social organism is formed like the natural to these necessities would not only have given the
organism. As the natural organism must provide for Empire the correct inner structure; it would also
thinking by means of the head and not the lungs, the have lent justification to its foreign policy. The
formation of the social organism in systems - none German people could have lived together with the
of which can assume the functions of the others, non-German peoples through such a policy.
although each must cooperate with the others while
always maintaining its autonomy - is necessary. Insight should now mature from the calamity.
One should develop a will for the best possible
The economy can prosper only if it develops, as social organism. Not a Germany which no longer
an autonomous member of the social organism, exists should face the world, but a spiritual, a
according to its own forces and laws, and if it does political and an economic system should propose
not introduce confusion into its structure by letting to deal as autonomous delegations, through their
itself be drained by another member of the social representatives, with those who crushed that
organism - the politically active one. This politically Germany which became an impossible social
active member must function, fully autonomous, structure due to the confusion of its three systems.
alongside the economy, as the respiratory system
functions alongside the head system in the natural One can anticipate the experts who object to
organism. Healthy cooperation cannot be attained the complexity of these suggestions and find it
by means of a single legislative and administrative uncomfortable even to think about three systems
organ, but by each system having its own mutually cooperating with each other, because they wish
cooperating legislature and administration. to know nothing of the real requirements of life
The political system, by absorbing the economy, and would structure everything according to the
inevitably destroys it; and the economic system loses comfortable requirements of their thinking. This
its vital force when it becomes political. must become clear to them: either people will
accommodate their thinking to the requirements of
A third member of the social organism, in full reality, or they will have learned nothing from the
autonomy and formed from its own potentialities, calamity and will cause innumerable new ones to
must be added to these two: that of spiritual occur in the future.
production, to which the spiritual parts of the
other two sectors, supplied to them by this third
sector, belong. It must have its own legitimate
rules and administration and not be administered
or influenced by the other two, except in the sense
that the members of the natural organism mutually First published in Rudolf Steiner, The Renewal of
influence each other. the Social Organism, igig. Appendix, GA24.

91
An appeal for an alternative

Joseph Beuys

This appeal is directed to all people belonging to 1 have occupied myself for many years with this
the European cultural sphere and civilization. question. Without the help of many other people
The breakthrough to a new social future will be whom I encountered in my research and experiences,
successful, if in the European zones a movement I certainly would not have arrived at the answers
emerges which tears down the walls between East which I would like to communicate in this appeal.
and West and closes the rift between North and And this is why these answers are not ‘my opinion’,
South by its power for renewal. We maintain that but that which numerous others have also recognized
a start would be made, if the Middle Europeans to be true.
decide to act in accordance with this appeal. If
we in Middle Europe would start today to follow These are still too few to accomplish an instant
a path responding to the demands of the time for change. The number of those having the proper
coexistence and cooperation in our states and insights has to grow. If we should succeed in giving
societies, this would have a strong influence on a compact political and organizational form to that
every other place in the world. which we call into being herewith and in applying
it finally in a concentrated non-parliamentary-
Before we ask what can we do? we have to first parlimentary action , then this appeal has reached its

consider the question how must we t hi nk ? in order goal. What is at stake is a non-violent revolution, an
that the usual approach to the highest ideals of alternative which is designed to remain open toward
humanity limited to phrases proclaimed by all party the future.
programs today, does not continue to spread as an
expression of its flagrant contradiction to what we The symptoms of the crisis
actually do in practice in our economic, political, The problems which give us every reason to turn
and cultural dealings in real life. away from the prevailing conditions we assume to
be well-known. It should suffice here to call to mind
We warn, however, against a thoughtless turnabout. the most decisive factors of the total predicament in
Let us begin with self -reflection . Let us first look for a summary ordered by key words.
the grounds which call for our turning away from
the prevailing state of things. Let us seek the ideas The military threat
which point in the direction of a change. Even without the actual aggressive intentions of
the super powers, there is a danger of an atomic
Let us examine our concepts according to which we destruction of the world. The military technology
have shaped the conditions in East and West. Let us and the type of stockpiling of weapons which has
reflect whether these concepts have benefited our been preposterously increased no longer admits any
social organism and its interactions with the natural control over the total apparatus already impossible
order, whether they have led to the appearance of a to survey. In spite of the stockpiled potential
healthy existence or have made humanity sick, for the destruction of the earth a hundred times
inflicted wounds on it, brought disaster over it and over, behind the backdrops of the so-called dis­
are putting today its survival in jeopardy. armament negotiations the arms race intensifies with
every year.
Let us examine in careful scrutiny of our needs
whether the concepts of Western capitalism and The result of this collective madness is an enormous
Eastern communism are open enough to perceive wastage of energy and raw materials and a gigantic
that which emerges ever more distinctly from the waste of the creative faculties of millions of people.
stream of the development of our modern age as the
central impulse in the soul of humanity and which
expresses itself as the will to a concrete personal
responsibility and that means, not to be harnessed
anymore in relations involving command and
subjection, power and privileges.

92
The ecological crisis The crisis of consciousness and meaning
Our relation to nature is characterized by its having Most people feel helplessly at the mercy of the
become thoroughly disturbed. There is the threat surrounding conditions. In the destructive processes
of total destruction for our fundamental natural they are subjected to, in the impenetrable tangle of
basis. We are doing exactly what it takes to destroy political and economic power, in the distractions
this basis by putting into action an economic system and diversion gambits of a cheap entertainment
which consists in unscrupulous exploitation of industry, they cannot find any existential meaning.
this natural basis. It has to be clearly spelled out
that in this regard the capitalist economic system Especially the young fall in growing numbers
of the West is basically no different than that of victim to alcoholism, become addicted to drugs,
the stale capitalism of the East. The destruction is commit suicide. Hundred thousands of them are
implemented on a world-wide-scale. victimized by fanatics under the guise of religion.
There is a boom of escapism. As a pendant to this loss
Between the mine and the garbage dump extends of personal identity and depersonalization we see
the one-way street of the modern industrial civil­ the slogan ‘after me the flood!’, the reckless pursuit
ization to whose expansive growth more and more of the pleasure principle, the complete adjustment
lifelines and life cycles of the ecological systems are in the attempt to get of the total meaninglessness
sacrificed. of life, as long as this lasts, all there is to get, without
any consideration for those whose account is being
The economic crisis overdrawn for the difference.
This manifests itself in a great number of symptoms
which fill the newspapers and media broadcasts This difference is one which our environment, our
daily. Strikes and lock-outs, billions of people, if fellow-men and posterity will have to pay. The time
counted on a world scale, are unemployed and cannot has come to supersede the systems of ‘organized
put their faculties into use for the common good. irresponsibility’ (Bahro), by an alternative of equal­
In order not to slaughter the holy cow, 'the laws of ization and solidarity.
marketing’, giant amounts of the most valuable food
products which accumulate in the subsidized over­ The causes of the crisis
production are destroyed without the batting of an Reduced to essentials, the situation shows two
eyelash, while at the same time in other areas of the structural elements of the social systems that have
world thousands are dying of hunger daily. come into power in the twentieth century as the
actual causes of the whole misery: money and the
What we see here is not the concern to produce in state , that is, the roles which are accorded to money

response to the demands of the consumers but the and the state in these systems. Both elements have
skilfully disguised wastage of goods. become the decisive means of power, power belongs
TO THO SE IN WHOSE HANDS LIES THE MONEY AND/OR THE
This kind of business methods surrenders humanity state .The money concept of capitalism is the basis
ever more consequently into the power of a clique of that system just as the totalitarian concept of
of multinational big concerns, who decide over the state is the basis of communism as we have come to
fate of us all at their conference tables with the top experience it heretofore.
functionaries of the communist state monopolism.
In the meantime, both of these concepts have
Let us leave out one more characterization of that been reciprocally assimilated into the prevailing
which is constantly delivered free of charge into our conditions in the West as in the East. In the West,
homes under the names o f‘monetary crisis’, ‘crisis of the tendency to expand the functions of the state
democracy', the‘crisis of education', the'legitimation is growing, while in the East have been introduced
crisis of the state', etc., and let us in conclusion talk the factors of the money mechanisms as developed
briefly about. by capitalism. Although there are clear differences
between the Western and Eastern capitalism, for
instance in regards to observing human rights,

93
nevertheless it is true that both systems increasingly Unfortunately, especially in circles of alternative
tend towards destructivity and pose an extreme thinking, the view persists that concepts do not
threat for the future of humanity by their mutually matter. This wanton prejudice has to be overcome
opposing each other in a power play. This is why the if the new social movement wants to become influ­
time has come for ‘both of them to be superseded by ential and become a political force. For, concepts
a new principle’, for, both of them are ‘coming to an are always connected to very far reaching practice,
end’ (Gruhl). and the way in which one thinks about a certain
issue is decisive for the manner in which one treats
In our case, this cannot happen in any other way this issue, and first of all: how and whether one
except by a change in our constitution. What has understands it at all.
meanwhile become a neurotic adherence to the basic
law has made us blind and incapacitated in the face In the outline of the alternative, that is, of the third
of the necessity to develop its promises. way, of which the communist party first and now

the PCI (Partito Communista Italiana) also speaks


Really, why shouldn’t it be possible, in a society where positively, we think of man first. He is the builder of
democracy has been developed to a certain level, the social sculpture and according to his dimensions
to discuss in the freest possible way the necessary and intentions the social organism must be formed.
further developments? Too many people already
are afraid that if they did so they would become In accordance with the feeling for and the recognition
suspect as enemies of the constitution. They deny of human dignity, three basic needs are held by man
themselves any creative thought on the extension today as pre-eminent:
of legal conceptions already formed earlier on, even
though the progress of consciousness demands 1. He wants to develop freely his faculties and his
this. As indeed it does. The result: capitalism and personality and to put to use his capacities, jointly
COMMUNISM HAVE LED HUMANITY INTO AN IMPASSE. with the capacities of his fellow-men, freely for a
purpose which he has recognized to be meaningful .
However undeniable all this may be and however
widespread this insight, we still would get little 2. He views every kind of privilege as an unbearable
help if no reasonable models for a solution have violation of the legitimate democratic right for
been developed, and that means, ideas for a free, equality. He has the need, as a person of age in respect
democratic solution which places us in solidarity to all rights and duties - be they in an economic,
with our fellow-men and with what is given in nature, social, or cultural context - to be recognized as an
sustained by a farsightedness and responsibility for equal among equals and to have a say in the democratic

the future and concern for the whole of humanity. process on all levels and in all areas of society.
Such models have been developed. Here we undertake
to report on one such definite model as follows. 3. He wants to give solidarity and to claim solidarity.
Perhaps, it will be doubted that this expresses a pre­
The way out eminent basic need of man today, because egoism
Wilhelm Schmundt has asked for a ‘corrective re­ is by far the predominant motive in the behaviour
thinking of the concepts’ as the central issue of of individuals today. But a conscientious scrutiny
a well-founded alternative. This is also the view shows a different situation. Egoism certainly may
of Eugen Lobl, the economist theoretician of the be in the foreground and determine one’s behaviour.
‘Spring of Prague' as he speaks of the ‘ revolution However, it is not a need, or a sought for ideal. It is a
of concepts ’. Schmundt has given, one of his books drive which rules and dominates. Yet, what is wished
the title ‘ Revolution and Evolution’, and by it he for is: mutual help given by free choice .
wants to say ‘Only after we have reflected anew
on the basic conditions of the social organism and When this impulse of solidarity is felt as a human
have accomplished a ’revolution of the concepts’ ideal and the ideal of humanity, then the task is
will we open a way for an evolution without coercion posed, to change those mechanisms which activate
and arbitrariness. the egoistical drive through the social structures, in

94
such a way that they do not oppose the inner human If we take cognizance of these realities and do not
intentions. proceed to ignore them for the sake of this interest
or that or out of sheer indifference, then we have
And these structures are changed in thefollowing way: to put on record that with the transformation from
an exchange economy (even monetary change
The 'integral system’ of the new concept of work, and economy) to the integral economy, the relation of
the new concept of income. work and income has been altered fundamentally.
If we were to draw the conclusions from just these
The economic life in industrial societies which are insights and acted accordingly, then a radical
based on a division of labour, has developed, as Eugen change of today’s economic realities would happen
Lobl says, into an integral system . This means, when as a result. The income which people need for the
people are working they leave the private sector and preservation and unfolding of their life would not
stream over to the associated production sites. The be a derivative quantity but a fundamental right,
products of their work do not come on the market a human right which has to be ensured in order to
by exchange individually or through the guilds, fulfil the preconditions for their being able to work
but they arrive there through the joint operations of responsibly and by self-determination in the midst
complex processes. Each end product is the result of of their colleagues.
a joint activity of all in the framework of the world
economy . To safeguard income as an elementary human
right, the democratic agreement according in the
All activities, including those of education, training, point of view of needs is the most objective guiding
science, banking, management, parliaments, media, principle. The amount and type of work are also
etc. are integrated into this whole. questions which have to be treated and regulated
by the democratic community in general and by
Two processes form the basic structure of this type the workers’ collectives in particular, in accordance
of economy: The stream of capacity values coming with their forms of self-government.
into use in the process of work and the stream of
mental and physical consumer values . The technical All of today’s compulsions, injustice, and frustr­
means of production have to be seen here as higher ation which are the result of the anachronism of
developed resources. wage labour, would be disposed of, and unions and
employer’s associations become superfluous. If
Each work performed is principally work for others . there are differences in income, then they would be
That means that each working person makes his comprehensible and intended democratically. The
contribution at a different point for the production sociopsychological consequences of the overcoming
of a value, which, in the last analysis, will be used by of wage dependency would also be positive ones. No
one of his fellow-men. Thus, a man’s work does not one would buy and no one would sell his capacities
stand anymore in connection with his consumption. and work. In respect to income, all working people
The other feature which is as far-reaching in its would belong to the democratic community of
importance is that the character of the integral citizens enjoying equal rights.
system does not allow anymore to view the income
of the working person as the exchange value for the The change in the function of money
achievements they produce. For, there can’t be any Just as in the transition to integral economy a
objective standard for computing the share of the profound transformation took place in the essence of
individual’s achievement in the production of a work, in the money processes too, a metamorphosis
given consumer value, no more than the objective occurred. However, just as the concepts of the
share of an enterprise can be computed in the gross exchange trade kept their validity in regulating the
national product. conditions of work and income, they also remained a
determining force for the organization of the money
system. Thus, money could not be integrated in an
ordered way into the social organism.

95
For this reason, the monetary system has been the enterprises, in so far as some have surpluses and
analysed from the perspectives of psychological, other deficits, has to be undertaken in connection
sociological, economical and other theories. But with the associated banks.
they have been of little help. The power of money
remained undiminished. Why? Because we have not This money concept elevated to the achieved level of
changed our concept of money as required by the social evolution has thoroughgoing effects. It solves
historic development. the problem of power as far as it arose from the side
of money. Because we refused to see that the money
What has made us continuously ignore the change system has not remained only a part of economic life
in the function of money? This change occurred with but has become an autonomous system of functions
the appearance of the central banks in the modern in the legal sphere, the old Roman ideas of property
development of money. Money was disengaged were able to remain unconditionally intact. In this
from the realm of economic values for which it has way too, the categories of ‘ profit’ and Toss’ could
previously served as a universal means of exchange. come into play. The unlimited appropriation of
everything, connected with the sites of production
The new way of issuing and transacting money by the remained legal.
institution of the central bank led to the formation
of a systematic cycle within the social organism, Whereas, the recognition of the changed money
by which the social whole took on a more complex concept would lead to the abandoning of the principle
form, comparable to an evolutionary step in the of property as well as of the principle of profit in
biosphere from a lower to a higher organism. Money the sphere of production, without one single civic
formed a new functional system. It became the legal measure or any fiscal acrobatics.
regulative principle for all creative and consumptive

processes. And what happens then to the business at the stock


market, real-estate speculation, usury and inflation?
On the side of production, the employers need money They disappear, just as the scourge of unemployment
for the fulfilment of their tasks. They receive it from too. The world of stocks dies overnight, without a
the banks as a credit (the interest, linked today to single cog-wheel having to stop for all that. And
the concept of credit, is derived from a conception of the shareholders, the speculators, the real-estate
money contradictory to its essence!). owners? Are they going to offer their sacred wealth as
a sacrifice to humanity on the altar of the beginning
In the hands of the employers money = production of a new era? We shall see. In any case everyone is
capital ,it is a legal document. It obligates the going to find his place in the life of society, where he
enterprise to employ the capacities of their co- is able to use his capacities freely, productively, and
workers for work. meaningfully for the benefit of the whole.

When the money enters the worker’s sphere of As far as the consumer sphere is concerned, matters
disposition as income, then its legal meaning will be such that production will be determined by
changes. As consumption capital it entitles the the needs of the consumers. No profit or property
consumer to the purchase of consumer goods. interests will be in the way or distract from this
objective economic goal. Brotherliness, which
Thus, the money flows back to the sphere of has basically been realized with the coming of the
production and changes its meaning once again. integral system - ‘Work has principally become
Now it is money unrelated to an economic value . A s work for others' - can develop fully, without any
such it entitles the enterprise it reaches to nothing. hindrance.
With it credits are discharged, the accounts of the
enterprises at the banks of credit are balanced. Since The ecological question too, is seen in a new Light.
many kinds of enterprises - for instance, schools and The economics of ecology becomes a matter of
universities - do not demand any payments for their course when a free science, free education, and free
services, the mutual balancing of accounts among information explore comprehensively the laws of

96
life conservation and spread these and clarify their What applies thus for the associations of workers'
meaning for humanity. collectives among themselves, also plays a role for
the basic structure of the individual free enterprises.
The form of freedom of the sociological organism Once overcome, the contrast between ‘employer’
To entrust the state with the guidance of social and ‘employee’ opens the field for a form of society
development would be thinkable if it did not radically in which are intertwined processes of free counsel
contradict the impulse toward freedom, the demand of DEMOCRATIC AGREEMENT, a n d o f [OINT ACTION for the
for self-determination, personal responsibility and social environment.
self-government (decentralization). Therefore, the
last important question which arises in regard to Every person has the right to a free initiative for
the picture of the evolutionary alternative of the enterprise. For man is an enterprising being. It is
Third Ways is posed: How can a society free of necessary that the leaders of the workers have the
coercion find its direction geared to human needs ability to employ their co-workers in accordance
and to the development dictated by the necessities with theirprofessional capacities and know-how. But
of nature? This can be answered only by the from this function they will not derive any material
description of the ‘Form of Freedom of the Social privileges nor any other form of power which has not
Organism’ (Sehmundt). been democratically sanctioned.

Freedom is, on the one hand, an individual impulse Thus, in the picture of the fundamentals of the
to carry out one’s actions on the basis of self- Third Way, in a self-governing economy and a self-
determined motives. On the other hand, a self- governing culture, the free enterprise is the
determined action is free only when it is enacted on democratic basic unit of a post-capitalist and post­
the basis of an 'insight into the conditions of life as communist NEW SOCIETY OF TRUE SOCIALISM.
a whole’ (Rudolf Steiner).
State legislation, government and administration
For the complex conditions of our production under are limited there to the function of deciding on the
a division of labour, this means that the single universally binding democratic rights and duties
individual and the single enterprise has great and enforcing their realization.
difficulties in finding by itself perspectives which
would favour the particular task of producing The state is going to shrink considerably. We shall
something for the needs of others. Therefore, it is see what remains.
necessary to incorporate into the social body a new
system of functions: a system of advisory boards , an What can we do now for the realization of the
authentic councillors’ system as a permanent source Alternative?
of inspiration.
Anyone who envisages this picture of the
Every workers’ collective can gain insights into the evolutionary alternative has a clear understanding
condition, relations, and effects of its actions in o f t h e SO C IA L SCULPTURE w h i c h MAN AS AN ART IST is

the best possible way if it calls a council, in which helping to build.


the democratically authorized management of the
enterprise consults with the leading personalities Anyone who says that there has to be a change, but
of other enterprises, of banks, of scientific research skips over the ‘Revolution of concepts’ and charges
institutes and also with the representatives of the only against the external embodiments of the
consumers, about the tasks, goals and developments ideologies, is going to fail. He will either resign, give
of the enterprise from as extensive points of view himself satisfied with reforms, or land in the blind
as possible. The decisions have to be taken by those alley of terrorism. All three are forms of victory for
who are responsible in each particular case. These the strategies of the systems.
decisions are going to be based on an optimal
objective discernment due to the councillors’ help.

97
If we finally ask the question: what can we do? in The process of recasting hardened concepts and
order to reach the goal of the new reorganization theoretical attempts is under way. It has to lead to a
starting at the fundaments, then we have to realize: big di alogue , to a communication between factions,

there is only one way of transforming the established disciplines and nations on the alternative models
order, but it requires a wide range of different measures. for a solution. The free international university (Free
University for Creativity and Interdisciplinary
This only way is non-violent transformation . Non­ Research) is the permanent bid to organize and
violent, not because violence does not seem to develop this communication,
promise success at the moment or for some special
reasons. No. Non-violence has to be based on ‘Against the combined interests of the powerful,
human, spiritual and moral, and social and political only an electrifying idea has a chance which is at
grounds. least as strong as that of Humanism in the last and
that of Christianity of the first centuries of our era’
On the one hand, the dignity of man is inextricably (Gruhl). In order to penetrate to this ‘electrifying
bound up with the inviolability of the person, and idea' across the different beginnings alive in the
whoever disregards this, leaves the plane of being new social movement, we need a constant and all-
human. On the other hand, the systems which need to embracing dialogue, free international university
be changed are built on violence of every imaginable as a place for the organizing also includes all the
kind. Therefore, every way of using violence is an groups and live cells in our society in which people
expression of conformity which thus consolidates have banded together to think through the questions
that which it wants to dissolve. of the future of our society together. The greater the
number of people who collect for this work, the
This appeal wants to encourage and exhort to adopt stronger and more effective the alternative ideas
the way of non-violent transformation. To those who will be. Here then, is our appeal: Let us create jobs at
have been passive till now even though filled with the free international university , the university of
discomfort and dissatisfaction goes our call: become the people.
acti ve ! Your activity is perhaps the only thing which

could lead those who are active but flirt with the use But this alone is not enough. Wherever possible,
of violence or already are using violence, back to the we should commit ourselves to the practice of
way of non-violent action. an alternative mode of living and working. Many
have made a beginning already in small areas and
Although the indicated ‘Revolution of concepts’ is special fields. An alliance of alternative economic
the core of the method for change presented here, it and cultural enterprises is the constructive
does not absolutely have to come at the beginning initiative action third way (union of enterprises,

of all steps. Absolute claims are foreign to it too. foundation, members organization). Individual
Anyone who is strong enough to examine thoroughly groups or enterprises which want to add actions to
the theories of Marxism, liberalism, the Christian their alternative ideas are called upon to support
social ethic down to their last conclusion, will find this project.
that they arrive at the same results as we do.
A final relevant aspect. Perhaps the most important
This examining of historic trends down to their and decisive one for the way of the non-violent
last conclusions is necessary today. Where it was transformation. How can the new social movement
courageously achieved, one noticed how the fronts achieve a political dimension ?
are shifting. There Bahro stands nearer to Karl-
Hermann Flach and William Borm than these stand
to their party friend Lambsdorff, and to those of
their comrades who took him prisoner and found
him guilty.

98
This poses the question, at least for the context of the A joint election campaign of the general alternative
Western democracies, concerning the possibility of movement is viable only as an alliance of many
parliamentary action. If we choose this way, then we autonomous groups, which shape their reciprocal
are right in following it only if we develop a new style relations and those to the general public in the
of political work and political organization. Only if spirit of active tolerance . Our parliaments need the
we get practice in this new style, will we be able to liberating spirit and life of such a union, the union
overcome the obstacles which are put in the way of FOR THE NEW DEMOCRACY.
alternative development in the form of restrictive
clauses and the like. The vehicles which are starting on the new course are
thus ready, They offer room and work for everyone.
It really is necessary that from the side of the
parliaments as well, alternative models for solutions Those readers who are interested in receiving
are advanced, noticeable to the general public. For information and collaborating in the project ‘Free
this to happen, those people who have developed International University’, ‘Constructive Initiative
such models have to get into the parliaments, How Third Way’ and 'Union for the New Democracy’
do they get in? By concentrating their whole energy should write to:
in a JOINT ELECTION CAMPAIGN.
FREIE INTERNATIONALE HOCHSCHULE FUR KREATIVITAT UNO
For the success of such an attempt it is crucial how the INTERDISZ1PLINARE FORSCHUNG E. V.
whole alternative movement is viewed. This consists Diisseldorf
of a true abundance of different currents, initiatives,
organizations, institutions, etc. They have only one
chance of success, that of moving jointly. First published in English and German in
documenta 7 (exh. cat.), Kassel, 1982, pp. 370-373
However, joint election campaign does not mean:
party organization, party program, party debates in
the old style. The needed unity can only be the unity
IN PLURALITY.

The movement of citizens’ initiatives, the ecological


movement, the peace movement, the women’s move­
ment, the movement of models for practice, the
movement for a democratic socialism, a humanistic
liberalism, the Third Way, the anthroposophical
movement and the different Christian denomin­
ationally oriented movements, the movement for
civil rights and the Third World movement have
to realize that they are indispensable ingredients
of a general alternative movement, parts which do
not exclude or contradict, but which supplement
each other.

The reality is that there are Marxist, Catholic,


Lutheran, liberal, anthroposophical, ecological,
etc. alternative concepts and initiatives. In many
essential points there already is a high degree
of agreement amongst them. This is the basis of
collectivity in unity. In other points there is a lack of
agreement. This is the basis of freedom in unity.

99
Joseph Be uy s
Fell suit (Filzanzug), 1 970
M u s e u m of C o n t e m p o r a r y Art , S y d ne y J.W. Po we r Bequest , p ur c h a s e d L972

IOO
Exhibition checklist

Joseph Beuys German 1921-86

Intuition 1968 We are the revolution (La rivoluzione siamo Noi) 1971
wood, nails, graphite, screenprint on polyester, text, ink
edition of approximately 12,000 188.0 x 101.0 cm
30.5 x 21.7 x 5.8 cm Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney
National Gallery of Australia, Canberra Gift of Silvia Menzel, 1991 (1990.73)
Gift of Daniel Thomas, 1980. (80.1668)
Earth telephone (Erdtelephon) 1972
Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, no, no, no, no, no screenprint on felt paper
(Ja, ja, ja, ja, ja, nee, nee, nee, nee, nee) 1969 98.9 x 59.8 cm
felt, audiotape, 32 min, ed. 45/100 Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney
15.0 x 25.0 x 25.0 cm J.W. Power Bequest, purchased 1975 (1975.1)
National Gallery of Australia, Canberra
Gift of Dr K. David G. Edwards (Ret.), from the Directiveforces (Of a new society)
David and Margery Edwards New York Art (Richtkrdfte (Einer neuen Gesellschaft)) 1974-77
Collection, 2005. (2005.428.A-T) blackboards, chalk, easels, painted walking
stick, transparency with wooden lightbox,
Felt suit (Filzanzug) 1970 wooden plinths
felt, ink on synthetic fabric, cotton, 240.0 x 1186.0 x 521.0 cm (installation)
metal safety pins, wood, metal, ed. 69/100 Nationalgalerie im Hamburger Bahnhof,
186.0 x 73.0 x 2.0 cm irreg Staatliche Museen zu Berlin (B1079)
Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney
J.W. Power Bequest, purchased 1972 (P1972.5A-C) New York Subway poster 1983
photo-lithograph and colour screenprint
Zinc boxes, one covered with sulphur 28.0 x 70.5 cm (image and sheet)
(Tamponed corner) National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
(Mit Schwefel iiberzogene Zinkkiste Purchased with the assistance of Ian
(Tamponierte Ecke)) 1970 and Christine George, 2002 (2002.418)
zinc, sulphur, gauze, edition of 150
(a-b) 64.0 x 70.0 x 18.0 cm (installation)
Private collection, Melbourne

Trans-Siberian Railway
(Transsibirische Bahn) 1970-80
16 mm black and white film transferred
to DVD, sound, 22 min, ed. 42/45
National Gallery of Australia, Canberra
Purchased 1981 (82.2139)

How the dictatorship of the parties can be overcome


(So kann die Parteiendiktatur iiberwunden werden) 1971
ink on polyethylene film, felt
75.0 x 51.5 cm (bag); 68.0 x 48.0 x 1.2 cm (felt)
Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney.
J.W. Power Bequest, Gift of Mr Elwyn Lynn, 1973
(P1973.4A-B)

IOI
Rudolf Steiner Austrian 1861-1925

All works are chalk on black paper and from the Where the soul cannot enters May 1922
Collection of Rudolf Steiner Nachlassverwaltung, 77.0 x 126.0 cm irreg. (image);
Dornach, Switzerland 89.0 x 138.0 cm irreg. (sheet)
GA212/5

Other heads on our shoulders n August 1919 The etheric world 26 May 1922
75.0 x 89.0 cm irreg. (image); 71.0 x 97.0 cm irreg. (image);
94.0 x 130.0 cm irreg. (sheet) 94.0 x 142.0 cm irreg. (sheet)
GA296/3 GA212/10

Imagination - Inspiration - Intuition 20 March 1920 Fluctuating to the second power 25 July 1922
70.0 x 114.0 cm irreg. (image); 73.0 x 129.0 cm irreg. (image);
88.0 x 126.0 cm irreg. (sheet) 93.0 x 142.0 cm irreg. (sheet)
GA198/1 GA340/2

Beauty, wisdom, strength 28 November 1920 Apparent values 28 July 1922


51.0 x 122.0 cm irreg. (image); 68.0 x 136.0 cm irreg. (image);
86.0 x 143.0 cm irreg. (sheet) 92.0 x 146.0 cm irreg. (sheet)
GA202/5 GA340/4A

Hegel and Schopenhauer 4 December 1920 Adam Kadmon 30 September 1922


90.0 x 140.0 cm irreg. (image and sheet) 91.0 x 137.0 cm irreg. (image);
GA202/8 93.0 x 142.0 cm irreg. (sheet)
GA347/9
Freedom and love 19 December 1920
84.0 x 101.0 cm irreg. (image); Metamorphosis of the plant 30 September 1922
92.0 x 138.0 cm irreg. (sheet) 56.0 x i i o .o cm irreg. (image);
GA202/19 88.0 x 143.0 cmirreg. (sheet)
GA216/8
What is the present? 15 July 1921
88.0 x 138.0 cm irreg. (image); Winter and summer at the same time
91.0 x 143.0 cm irreg. (sheet) 29 December 1922
GA205/17 23.0 x 72.0 cm irreg. (image);
94.0 x 123.0 cm irreg. (sheet)
Anthroposophy as cosmosophy 9 October 1921 GA2r9/i3
85.0 x 138.0 irreg. (image); 91.0 x 139.0 irreg. (sheet)
GA207/16 High summer 8 April 1923
89.0 x 107.0 cm irreg. (image);
The threefold sun 29 October 1921 91.0 x 139.0 cm irreg. (sheet)
92.0 x 142.0 cm irreg. (image); GA223/8
94.0 x 144.0 cm irreg. (sheet)
GA208/8 When thoughts becomeforces 15 April 1923
66.0 x 148.0 cm irreg. (image);
The second human being 12 February 1922 90.0 x 149.0 cm irreg. (sheet)
49.0 x 126.0 cm irreg. (image); GA84/4
90.0 x 138.0 cm irreg. (sheet)
GA210/7 What is thinking? 20 April 1923
77.0 x 137.0 cm irreg. (image);
89.0 x 143.0 cm irreg. (sheet)
GA84/5

10 2
It is not the eye that sees 2 June 1923 Science and art 7 December 1923
56.0 x 123.0 cm irreg. (image); 92.0 x 138.0 cm irreg. (image);
92.0 x 143.0 cm irreg. (sheet) 93.0 x 143.0 cm irreg. (sheet)
GA350/3 GA232/11

The colours of the rainbow 9 June 1923 When you go eastwards 27 December 1923
88.0 x 138.0 cm irreg. (image); 87.0 x 133.0 irreg. (image);
90.0 x 139.0 cm irreg. (sheet) 93.0 x 146.0 cm irreg. (sheet)
GA350/6 GA233/6

In the night we are two people 16 June 1923 Physical body - Ether body 30 December 1923
72.0 x 102.0 cm irreg. (image); 86.0 x 138.0 cm irreg. (image);
91.0 x 141.0 cm irreg. (sheet) 91.0 x 138.0 cm irreg. (sheet)
GA350/9 GA233/12

Cosmic respiration 20 July 1923 The human being is music 26 February 1924
77.0 x r34.o cm irreg. (image); 82.0 x 139.0 cm irreg. (image);
93.0 x 145.0 cm irreg. (sheet) 93.0 x 142.0 cm irreg. (sheet)
GA350/20 GA278/8

What do dreams show us? 22 August 1923 Immanuel Kant 14 May 1924
124.0 x 100.0 cm irreg. (image); 80.0 x 140.0 cm irreg. (image);
150.0 x 103.0 cm irreg. (sheet) 90.0 x 140.0 cm irreg. (sheet)
GA227/1 GA353/16

Woven sunlight 19 October 1923 But the sun does move 17 May 1924
59.0 x 127.0 cm irreg. (image); 85.0 x 285.0 cm irreg. (image);
84.0 x 130.0 cm irreg. (sheet) 90.0 x 290.0 cm irreg. (sheet)
GA230/1 GA 3 5 3 /i 7 , i 8

The butterfly corona 28 October 1923 The stars and expression of love 4 June 1924
88.0 x 133.0 cm irreg. (image); 78.0 x 78.0 cm irreg. (image);
93.0 x 141.0 cm irreg. (sheet) 86.0 x 140.0 cm irreg. (sheet)
GA230/10 GA236/17

The mystery of plant growth 2 November 1923 The materialists 11 June 1924
90.0 x 140.0 cm irreg. (image and sheet) 88.0 x 77.0 cm irreg. (image);
GA230/11 82.0 x 122.0cm irreg. (sheet)
GA327/3
A head that is open on all sides 10 November 1923
82.0 x 132.0 cm irreg. (image); In the beginning there was heat 30 June 1924
83.0 x 135.0 cm irreg. (sheet) 90.0 x 144.0 cm irreg. (image);
GA230/19 92.0 x 145.0 cm irreg. (sheet)
GA354/1
Why people love the rose 25 November 1923
88.0 x 140.0 cm irreg. (image); Contemplation of the smallest 5 July 1924
88.0 x 143.0 cm irreg. (sheet) 57.0 x 136.0 cm irreg. (image);
GA232/4 88.0 x 138.0 cm irreg. (sheet)
GA317/12

10 3
The realm of the Angeloi 3 August 1924
55.0 x 43.0 cm irreg. (image);
93.0 x 146.0 cmirreg. (sheet)
GA237/7

The secret of the Century Almanac 13 September 1924


83.0 x 144.0 cm irreg. (image);
90.0 x 146.0 cm irreg. (sheet)
GA254/15

Theatre scenery 19 September 1924


52.0 x 120.0 cm irreg. (image);
88.0 x 123.0 cm irreg. (sheet)
GA282/18

10 4

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