Recollection: Joseph Beuys
Lynda Morris
There is a famous photograph of Joseph Beuys that first appeared in the Landeshauptstadt Dusseldorf on October 12 1972. The photograph has become the proof of his radicalism. It has been reproduced in all the major books and catalogues on Beuys and on bestselling posters and postcards as well. The original newspaper caption read: 'With a bag in his hand and a smile on his lips, Beuys emerged from the Secretariat, watched and flanked by the Police.' The newspaper report stated that at 6am on October10, 30 political police entered the Art Academy in Dusseldorf.
In 1972 I was a thesis student at the Royal College of Art in London, and I had arranged to go on an exchange to Dusseldorf Art Academy at the beginning of the autumn term to research and observe the teaching of Joseph Beuys, the Professor of Free Art.
I expected Dusseldorf Art Academy to be very bureaucratic. The RCA sent an official letter about my visit but I received no reply. A few days before I was due to leave for Germany, I rang Dusseldorf. It all seemed very casual. They told me to just turn up on the first day. I travelled first to Documenta 5 in Kassel, where Beuys had been lecturing for 100 days. Then I went onto the Kunstmarkt at the Cologne Kunstverein. When I arrived at the Academy in Dusseldorf there was chaos. Beuys promoted the idea of the creativity of every individual. He had therefore decided to accept every student who applied to study with him.
Beuys began teaching at the Academy in1961 as a Professor of Sculpture. In 1967 he founded the German Student Party, and then in1969 he founded the Bureau for Direct Democracy, in an office next door to Konrad Fischer's Gallery in Andreasstrasse in the Altstadt. It was said that Fischer paid the rent for Beuys's Bureau. It was good for business to have Beuys next door. It was also said that Gunter Grass and Beuys used to meet for dinner once a month with the then Chancellor Willi Brandt in a roadhouse restaurant outside Bonn.
In 1971 Beuys changed his title to Professor of Free Art. The term 'Free' had two very specific meanings in Germany at that time. First lit related to the Free University set up in West Berlin in the wake of the 1968 German Student Protest Movement. Secondly 'Free' was a Cold War term for the West – the Free World. At time when Germany was divided between East and West and West Berlin was an island in the East, the use of the term Free University of Free Art was both left wing and capitalist at the same time.
Beuys brought in three major reforms for his students at the Academy in 1971; he abolished academic entry requirements, replaced degrees with a 'Master Student' certificate and abolished the academic fees students were expected to pay. In Germany students applied to study with an individual professor, rather than to a particular college. In addition to accepting all the students who applied to him in1971, Beuys offered places in his class to 20 students who had been rejected by other professors. This caused a big row but eventually the Academy gave in to their most famous artist.
The following year, 1972, Professor Eduard Trier retired as director of the Academy and Norbert Kricke was appointed Temporary Director. Kricke was also a Professor of Sculpture, a formalist in the mould of David Smith or Anthony Caro; 125 students were rejected by the Academy that year, and Beuys let it be known they would all be welcome to join his class. Kricke appealed to Johannes Rau, the Wissenschaftminister, to send a letter to the 'rebel professor' warning him of dismissal if he continued to insist on free entry to all applicants to the Academy. The letter was delivered to Beuys the week before term started.
On October 10, the first day of term, 54 of the 125 rejected students – plus me – arrived and the administration refused to register them. Beuys and his students occupied the offices. They remained in the building all day and all night. At 6.00 am on the Wednesday the police arrived to escort Beuys and the students from the offices. That was the occasion of the famous photograph. Beuys and the students were allowed to remain in the Academy. Beuys remained in the Academy all day Wednesday and through the night. He continued to talk with his students who feared that some of the strangers with cameras and notebooks were political police rather than reporters.
Another press photograph shows Beuys at a meeting of the professors. Only eight of the 30 professors, including Gerhard Richter, voted to support Beuys. Several abstained, but the majority voted for his dismissal. While Beuys was at the meeting of the professors about 200 students marched through the streets of Dusseldorf with banners supporting Beuys and their photograph made the front page of the newspapers on Thursday.
On Thursday lunchtime Beuys received a letter from Johannes Rau sacking him. Rau, later to become the President of Germany, refused Beuys's invitation to come to the Academy to debate with him, saying: 'I cannot and will not allow myself to be made an art object.' A meeting of students voted 100% in support of Beuys and he and the students occupied the Academy all through Thursday. At 6pm that evening Beuys left the Academy for the first time, for a consultation with his lawyers. It was reported that the Kunstmarkt in Cologne had closed, shocked by the unimaginable dismissal of Beuys.
On the morning of Friday October 13, there was an uneasy atmosphere in the Academy. Marxist students were handing out leaflets. Beuys had not reappeared and without him the excitement evaporated and everyone was aware of his or her own difficulties. The unofficial students had no grants, the legal students did not know their situation and they needed Beuys to sign their registration papers. Students had brought in portfolios for Beuys to look through. A huge roll of newsprint was rolled through the great bare concrete corridors and the students wrote slogans on it. At noon the police arrived.
Two students, a boy and a girl, had held their own protest in the Secretariat, covering themselves in red and white paint and playing guitars. Their demonstration came to a peaceful conclusion and they came down the concrete staircase and walked to the front door of the Academy. As they got there they saw the police. They turned and ran back into the building. About 20 police entered the Academy, they ran down the corridor after the students and a violent scuffle took place. The two students resisted arrest, the police caught them and dragged them along the concrete floor. Other students tried to make a barricade with lockers and chairs. It was loud, it echoed and it was frightening: the police had guns and whips. About ten of the most active students were lined up facing the wall; their arms above their heads, and the police body searched them. Others students were shouting, arguing that the protest was not violent, they tried to persuade the police there was no problem. But these were the years of the Red Army Faction, the Baader-Meinhof Group whose deaths later in prison Beuys's colleague Gerhard Richter was to depict in his series of paintings 'October 18, 1977'.
Eventually Beuys arrived back at the Academy; some students had gone to fetch him from the Bureau in Andreasstrasse. Beuys had missed the police violence. He looked exhausted and was visibly shocked, but not as shocked as those of us who had experienced the violence. I had never experienced public violence before. I was now experiencing it in Germany and in an art school. It was not long after World War Two, Germany was divided and occupied. The photograph that had been taken in the early stages of the confrontation, when Beuys and the students were amused by the trouble they were causing, and Beuys was still Professor of Free Art, has come to stand for his defiance, his dismissal, and the legend of an arrest that never happened.
I came back to London and wrote about Beuys's dismissal for the student union at the RCA to campaign for international support for his reinstatement. Time Out and Studio International also published my accounts. But I have never been able to forget over the last 30 years the doubts that remained in my mind about Beuys. He sanctioned the use of that earlier photograph, and so by extension he sanctioned a subtle distortion of the history and politics of the period he symbolised. He confused the past with the present.
This report was originally published in March 2005 / No 284, p42-43.
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