Joseph Beuys was a famous German performance artist and played a crucial role on the development of Avant-garde art in Germany. He was born in Krefeld in 1921. When he was young, he was rebellious and played truant to work for a circus for about one year. In 1938, he joined in the Hitler Youth in 1936 and began to volunteered for the Luftwaffe in 1941. Once, Joseph’s plane shot down and crashed on the domain of Soviet Union. From 1945, he began to consider art as his full-time career. He completed his studies in 1953 when he was 32 years old.
Joseph read James Joyce, whose work full of Irish mythology impressed Joseph. Besides, he admired Leonardo da Vinci who are conscious of their position in society and who work accordingly.
One of Joseph’s
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The reason why felt and fat recurred in his work was that once his was rescued by a tribesman who had wrapped his wound in animal fat and warmed him with felt. It is not hard to discover that most of material he used were derived from stuff people use in daily life. Moreover, viewers often have hard time understanding the meaning behind Joseph’s artwork and his art work could not be described in words. As he has explained one of his famous work “How to Explain Pictures to a Dead Hare” in an interview, “I think nowadays there’s a deep misunderstanding amongst people that art should be understood through logical sentences which are in this frontal region... Art should be understood in the sense of completely understanding it… The work of art enters the person and the person internalizes the work of art as well, it has to be possible that these two completely sink into each other”. Therefore, I deem one of the purposes to create sophisticated performances and performance was that Joseph wanted to inspire viewers and encourage them to imagine. What Joseph believed was “everyone was an artist”. Furthermore, even though Joseph used similar material to create his artwork, the forms of those artwork were variable. But all of them had something in common that they are in simple shapes, a kind of archaic