Why Art - SOCIAL SCULPTURE

It's how we think.

On 1/11/2025, thirty or so people came to watch and discuss Joseph Beuys/TRANSFORMER, a film I made in 1979, at Good Taste Epicurean, in Franklin, NY.

In the 1970’s, Beuys was Professor of Monumental Art at the Arts Academy in Dusseldorf, Germany. 

It was a time of violence, internationally. Terrorists were bombing factories, kidnapping the wealthy and powerful, hijacking planes for ransom. TV news, print and radio were saturated with these frequent events. Terrorists were dominating the media narrative through fear and violent trauma. They were succeeding.

To counter terrorism, the German government reduced funding for the arts and began a campaign for educating engineers.

The poster we made for the screening shows a smiling Professor Beuys as police officers escort him from the academy. He was expelled for allowing more students than permitted to attend his classes. People also not enrolled at the school. He wanted to expand art education despite the government’s “undemocratic” shut down on culture. 

Within a year, together with writer Nobel Laureate Heinrich Böll, Beuys founded Free International University for Creativity and Interdisciplinary Research. Their project was to expand the definition of art. Beuys continued teaching through the new FIU institution, outside State control. He taught that artists can and should shape society and developed a practice called “social sculpture.” Beuys and Böll were also co-founders of the European Greens, an ecological political party. Beuys ran for office. 

Our intention with the screenings was to bring community together, to have conversations at this critical moment, social and politically. People from diverse stations in life.

NOTES: We began by saying that everyone in the room is actually engaged in shaping or sculpting their lives and the world, being aware of it or not. 

Story. In 1977, I had co-founded Art Corporation of America Inc. We scaled all the bridges in NYC to “put art on the front pages, replacing terrorism in media,” BRIDGING. Beuys and I were introduced through a mutual friend, Ronald Feldman, art dealer. Beuys invited me to Germany to present BRIDGING. We agreed to shoot TRANSFORMER at Beuys’ Guggenheim Museum exhibition, 1979-80.

I describe the film as “television sculpture,” using a 2 dimensional medium, evoking a tactile, physical effect. In it, BATHTUB, Beuys’ sculpture, a child’s bathtub with a lump of fat with a string, relates to creativity. A baby’s first “sculpture,” when shaping material (feces). It means a universal creativity, not limited to artists. The umbilical string – a connection with the womb.

One audience reaction to the art was a welcomed “shock and confusion.” This invited me to describe an aspect of art to stimulate, refresh, to create “sublime trauma” and to evoke a physical, non-conceptual experience of being vividly in our bodies. Art is a placeholder creating a safe, aesthetic disorienting, interrupting our mental patterns and perceptions. 

A woman asks: “Do we need trauma to learn?” “Does trauma teach us to grow, to find wisdom?” 

In TRANSFORMER, Beuys says, “We are all artists. We are responsible for the conditions of the world. It’s not the state or industry. As long as we don’t do something to change it, we are responsible…” 

An audience says, “I don’t know how to solve these problems.”

Through sublime trauma or suspending our preconceived ideas, art offers an open channel and energetic alertness. 

Can we understand how thoughts and patterns appear in our minds? How ideas dictate our speech and social behavior? Can we learn to deconstruct a problem, discovering hidden solutions? Its not up to only one of us to solve the problem. Everyone brings a piece to it.

Solving problems is not about divisionism or turning against each other. Maybe it's about turning toward and respecting “the artist” in in the other.

Like the child first shaping materials, can we shape how our thoughts and behavior impact the world? And when enough of us do this, Aren’t we making social sculpture?