Beuys

Joseph Beuys was a visionary artist whose work was ahead of its time. He was the first German artist to be granted a solo show at the Guggenheim Museum in New York. The film begins with his performance How To Explain Pictures to a Dead Hare in 1965 at the Galerie Schmela in Düsseldorf, in which he whispers abstruse art theory to a dead rabbit: “You want to make a revolution without a laugh?” Sculptor, performer, shaman, theoretician; still a charismatic, revolutionary and provocative artist thirty years after his death, his name is surrounded by an aura of myth. Andres Veiel reconstructs Beuys’s life between art, teaching and politics, and returns to the climate of debate, resistance and utopia in which he worked. Previously unreleased audio and video footage show a portrait of Beuys that, like the artist himself, leaves room for ideas instead of proclaiming affirmations, and makes explicit the tensions that gave life to his concept of a total work of art.