Mon, 22 May 2006

Social sculpture: being part of it here and now

From 3 to 6 June the Beuys symposium took place for the second time at Achberg on the eastern shores of lake Constance. Under the overall theme of “Capital: youth, nature and money”, around 200 participants, together with artists, scientists and educationalists, devoted themselves over three and a half days to asking how the extended concept of art of the major late-twentieth century German artist Joseph Beuys can contribute to solving our contemporary problems. This event was organised by the “Society for promoting the extended concept of art and social sculpture” in Wangen, and the Free International University (FIU).

NNA asked Edith Willer-Kurtz, who attended the three days in Achberg, to give her impressions of this event.

ACHBERG (NNA) – Rain all day long: whatever direction participants approached Achberg from, the Allgäu hills were overcast, complementing and contrasting with the sunshine at the first symposium a year ago. The initial lecture reminded us – over 150 participants – of the anniversaries of the death of Kant and Socrates, explaining the significance of this, but also their life and work, and later made the link with Beuys. We had arrived.

Lectures and seminars alternated, and each day was full of the most diverse angles on capital and its relation to youth, money and nature. Money is precisely what does not create capital, according to Beuys. During these events we experienced real learning through living contexts – including those within ourselves – extending these as processes so as to develop further in the future.

Beuys’s approach to things and his statements repeatedly came to expression – with particular immediacy in videos, where one could hear him in interviews or in conversation with his students of the time. Technology – happy to use it in this context. Drawings and artworks and impulses in lectures as seen from various professional perspectives and fields of work gave a sense of the all-embracing cultural contribution which Beuys left us as legacy. We followed him and were open-mouthed.

The path to mealtimes gave us ten minutes of movement, between the Achberg Hall and Humboldt House – felt like a good airing. The dining room sounded like a beehive: intense conversations, impressions of things that had struck us forcefully, and also getting to know each other.

We could also practice with the “mothers” , round wooden discs with a hole as currency – yes for tea and cakes too, but really for practising, to acquire proposals, ideas and offers hung up on the wall. The range on offer became excessive – which may or may not have made us pause to reflect. Why excess? Is this political or have we not yet understood something?

Local “regio” money. This currency was explained and practised – so far it’s used in 40 places in Germany. It was wonderful to hear of positive examples! The answer to handling money also became clear in performance: just chuck your money out of the window at last! Ours too, but also your own – wonderful – not pictorial but playful. Money laundering and medicinal songs brought us further, to laughter at least. But more than that as well.

Chatted, exchanged ideas, gave suggestions, further reading material, connections, reflecting out loud, stimulated by the lectures. Everything became so alive, enriching and spurred us all on: course leaders, speakers and participants, from young to old – as the best experiential example of Beuys’s social sculpture. It’s already happening right now, I felt, social sculpture is taking place in the intervals, exchange, entering into things – at different levels, in the awareness that we stand at the beginning of the future.

Striving for simple concepts not for simplification, we experienced at the same time how difficult this is. It seemed still more difficult to go through the zero point Beuys refers to, the needle’s eye, the threshold through which all of must pass, each on our own. Many diverse experiences: don’t we trust ourselves? We repeatedly come up against limitations. But soon, once we’ve practised it, we can listen better to one another. Allow warmth to arise in the social organism, initially sustained by those who have already passed through ahead of us. Out of nothing something has come towards them, they are on their way to the future, with all of us in their global consciousness.

Nature was a major theme for Beuys. He urges us to perceive nature with soul and sensitivity. How does it feel in our observation? Warm, cold, young, old, fresh, withered, weakly dignified, spiritually enlivened. Yes, in this way we would be able to experience things in our daily life more intensively, relate better to people, ideas, conflicts; then we’d be in a better position to structure our lives. What a fine insight; and, indeed, outlook! The tree planting was continued: 33 oaks were planted in the community wood, the second generation – 20 years after the Beuys’s oak planting action in Kassel. And growth will continue: trees, young people who bring so much of the future to us. Excessive impulses? No, there can never be too many, they are all welcome.

We drank in and experienced so much in Achberg that it will give us food for thought for a long time to come, gratefully and with the desire that such days of encounter should happen on a regular basis. On Saturday there were at least 250 of us. We took the Hare Path (symbol of the publishing company) singly and in silence, enjoying the wonderful nature here in sunshine (at last) as a welcome enrichment of all the sitting and thinking.

It is no doubt very much in the spirit of Beuys that the programme itself is only a means to entice people there, as the organisers said at the end: an enticement so that, in conversations in the breaks and intervals, we are together with one another, engaging in communication and exchange.

END/mb/cva

Item: 040615-01EN Date: 15 June 2004

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